Autumn

Station

Her hoodie is still damp

Her pocket is still full of blue-lined pages

She's a traveller she guesses

But this next station is large and it's crowded

Throngs of people with faces all tinted gray

She waits until the passengers have gotten off

Until there are no guards around

And she climbs down with as much agility as she can muster

She needs to melt seamlessly into this crowd

She has no money

She had had to run before she could pack anything

Stuffing the notebook into her pocket

And her half-empty backpack over her shoulder

Before she could pack anything

She'd laced up her ripped shoes

And she'd run into the woods

The woods she knew like the back of her hands

The woods that had raised her like a mother

Woods she'd be bidding farewell to

The people had looked for her in the town

And along the edge of the woods

But she crouched high in towering trees

Where they could never follow

She filled her stomach and her backpack full of berries

And she said goodbye to the forest that raised her

And she snuck onto the next train that pulled up into the station

She fled that town

Perhaps she'd be back one day to burn it down

Perhaps not

She was quite frankly out of both money and food now

But more importantly she was dehydrated

But that was a problem easily solved

If she was alright with drinking from the faucets in the public washrooms

It wasn't healthy

But beggars couldn't be choosers

She put her hands in her pocket, feeling the hard-soft edges of the scribbler under the thin layers of plastic

She smiled faintly