Ashes of Truth
By Anisky

Disclaimer:  Lucy and anyone else who you recognize does not belong to me. 

Chapter 2: Poetry

It’s strange, the way a single kiss can change the whole way you look at the world. Well, two kisses, I suppose. I haven’t kissed her since that day, a little over a week ago, but I know the way she looks at me. I think it’s the same way I look at her.

I knew from the moment I saw her that we’d be good friends. I walked up to her and introduced myself, which I’m normally shy about doing.


****

Lucy’s pencil broke, and she reached into her desk and pulled out a pencil sharpener. As she twisted her pencil, she read over the page she’d written, knowing that this one, as well, she would have to watch crackle and fall in flames before her eyes. She paused for a moment, and then leaned down to continue.


****

She’s beautiful.


****

Lucy stopped there, looking out of the window. It was a nice day outside. Lucy had gotten home from school a few hours ago, and it was still bright outside. She smiled.


****

It’s springtime. It’s appropriate, somehow. Spring is the time when new things are born. There’s a nest of birds outside my window, in the tree. They’re chirping, and it sounds like the way she’ll laugh and tell you something silly and fun.

She is springtime. She’s that beautiful flower that pokes its head out of the cold, frozen, dead ground that my life had become. And now, with the flower gracing the no-longer-dead earth, it finally seems like it’s there for a reason.

Her shining sunset-colored hair is just like the sunlight that’s shining through the window, casting light on everything. Things are still there when the sun’s not shining, it’s just that you just don’t see them without those thousands of tiny particles surrounding everything and making them shine up with the colorful brilliance that is life. Or that should be life.


****

Lucy wiped a tear from her eye as she looked out the window once again. “Never knew that I was a poet,” she murmured to herself, turning her eyes back down to the paper.


****

If I’m a poet, then she’s the poetry. No, that’s not right. Poetry is something that a poet creates, and I didn’t create her. I think she wrote me, except that I’m not poetry. Maybe she’s the inspiration of a poet.

I’ve never really known anyone like her. She sees things in a way I never have before. It’s like she doesn’t dismiss things just because they’re impossible. Everything’s possible. I’ve never lived that way. I like it.

You know, I’ve never liked writing in a journal before. It would always make my hand cramp up and hurt, and was taking away from valuable time. But I like just sitting and writing about her. She’s that special.

She’s so tiny and delicate, a few inches shorter than me and I’m hardly tall. Well, strike that. She looks tiny and delicate, but she’s one of the strongest people I know. She’s a much better person than I am, though she’d get angry with me for saying that. She thinks I’m beautiful.


****

Lucy put her pencil down, calmly but with a sort of decisive look. She sat back to read what she’d written, a sad smile coming to her face.

“It seems like a waste, somehow,” she said to herself as she crumpled up the paper and walked across the room to place it in the ceramic bowl she’d used a week ago. “I’ve never written poetry before.”

She reached into the drawer and pulled out the pack of matches, smelling the sulfur as she struck the match against the carton. It flared, and she placed it into the bowl with the paper, watching as once again the words of her heart crackled and snapped and from the white truth it curled into blackness.

“No…” she murmured, as at last all that was left in the bowl were a few small embers, and then nothing. “It’s not a waste, because the poetry wasn’t what I wrote on the page.” Her voice was full of wonder, as is the voice of any girl who has just discovered magic.

She stuck her finger in the ashes to make sure that they were out, then brushed them into the trash can. She smiled as she whispered. “She is the poetry, and as long as Cassie is in my life, I am a poet, no matter what’s down on paper.”

The fire was Cassie’s hair, but the ashes were Lucy’s soul.