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heat.
She ran from them, feet stumbling over the cracked,
scorched ground, overturning her buckets behind her and
spilling them into the earth, torrents pouring from her
wrists, unable to hold the heaviness any longer.
When the water trickled down into the parched earth, she
lay, barely breathing in the mud and prayed
Oh, Light,
How she prayed, for the sun to dry her up while she slept.
The starry sky cloaking for once the unforgiving sun
soothed her to sleep with its dark blue, a shade of that col-
or she’d never seen outside of herself.
In the morning, she woke, not to bleached-bone death but
to green life, a bed of grass holding her safe as she realized:
the water she had tried so hard to contain had taught the
broken ground to grow trees again.
Gabriele Morgan is a
psychology and english
student at Bluefield College,
whose greatest loves in life are
people and their stories.
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