2016Bluestone

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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