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