Sisterhood
She can't remember her original name
It doesn't matter
She can remember the fire inside her
That is all that matters
Artemis Inciendio is who she is now
And it's what her new family knows her by
She's been here for who knows how long
In this dead-inside city
Months upon months
That shouldn't be enough to forget your own name but that name was forced upon her and it wasn't her's
So she tried her best to shove it out of her mind and it worked
She had made friends
With other wanderers like her
They were hungry together they were starving together sometimes they were cold together in winters and melting together in summers
She'd passed around the coil scribbler, and they'd all read the blue-inked words scrawled across it
It wasn't Artemis's handwriting
She had no idea whose it was to be honest but it was beautiful
They read to each other and told each other the stories until they were ingrained into their minds.
Fast forwards a few more months
It's the dead of winter
And it's an unnatural cold the cold of marginalization the cold of poverty the cold of nobody caring about you
Not the cold of Parent Nature
She's on the verge of womanhood but not quite there
She's huddled with two other girls in an alley somewhere
Under a raggedy black blanket
The tips of her fingers and her toes go frozen numb
Then her hands and feet
Then her arms and legs
It doesn't stop this time
The sun doesn't peak out of the clouds this time
They tell each other bits of the stories in the notebook
And it's like a fire it warms them
But not quite enough
When it finally is morning, a raven-haired girl untangles herself from two dead bodies, tears streaming down her face
She picks up the notebook in her thin, long, spider-like fingers
And she kisses it
And she kneels in front of her soul-sisters for a moment
And she gets up
And she walks into the morning
A worn-edged notebook in the pocket of her hoodie
———
If you like this piece check out my Mastodon my account is [email protected] and I post about human rights, social justice, and the environment.
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Does this take place in Canada? I always wondered how Canadian travellers deal with those brutal winters. Here in the States we're lucky enough to be able to just hop or hitch straight down to warmer states