“F-father?…where…Where are you?” I coughed as the smoke scorched my throat and suffocated my weak lungs. “P-please…someone?… anyone?…” I desperately whispered, my quivering voice failing as I slowly staggered into the next room blindly trying to escape the burning heat of the consuming fire. I fell to my knees and started to cry, my tiny frame rocking with each gasping breath. “Thank God you’re alive!” A deep voice yells as a large pair of hands grabbed my small pale arm from behind, crushing my bones as my father quickly yanked me up from the marble floor, dragging me across what is left of our burning home before throwing me out the front door.

I landed face down in the mud and the rocks, my oval face becoming a bloody mess. The hair on the back of my neck suddenly stood on end as I struggled to pull myself to my knees hearing a loud sickening snap of wood. I knew what I would find even as I scrambled to turn around, my wide eyes focusing on the scene before me. The door frame had broken. It had fallen. Beneath it lay my father. Dead. My father is dead. I scream.
………………(ten years later)……………….


I awake in an instant, my heart racing, beating hard within my chest. I quickly glance at the surrounding forest, my pale hand resting on the jagged knife at my side. Alone. I am alone. Not in the house. Not in the fire. Not anymore.

I let out a sigh of relief and watch the subtle changing light as I wait for my heart to still. The light slowly brightens the sky, finally I rise from where I lay. I slowly brush the dirt and leaves out of my long tangled brown hair and off my ragged dress. I bend, my slender back aching from sleeping on the cold hard ground night after night, and grab my stolen cloak wrapping it around my narrow, bruised shoulders and pull the hood over my head.

I shiver a bit as the wind blows the cold chill of winter into my feeble body. But I am not feeble. I am strong. I survived.