She Will Be Consumed by Smoulder and Ashes

an excerpt

“It has all been for naught” were the words that echoed between her ears as she blew around the stone cottage with much to do and nothing to do at the same time. Everything and nothing had changed in the single room that she had occupied for the entirety of her memory. The sharp pang that she felt in the place where her throat met her chest whenever the idea of her mother and father emerged in her mind was the reason she didn’t give them much consideration. They had not set eyes on her since her birth, or so the saying went. All she had known as a child was that the wooden shutters were wrenched open and closed each day by someone faceless in their brevity. A small basket of food would be deposited on a hook below the window, and she would eat greedily, never having anything left over to quell the unrest in her stomach that emerged when it was dark and time to settle into sleep. Her naïve complacence bore hobbies that lived in the confines of that window, her days melted away in the act of perfecting animal calls. Herself yearning for the connection that occurred only between two sets of eyes, holding, desperate for just a little more time. She lured the creatures with bits of fruit and bread, first tossing them at a safe distance and then willing them to take the food directly from her long fingers. Her perseverance was fed by the consistent invasive perturbation that her time spent was frivolous, what she desired could not be conjured from the danger and distrust of the wild. But time wore them all down and in short measure she would hear the crack of fallen detritus under deer hooves in the treeline and the scrabble of squirrel paws across her thatch roof before she had even procured her offerings.