Chapter 2: Moving On

A truck rumbling in the very near distance startled Jule to a complete stop. The stillness, that had been trying to catch her, abruptly surrounded her shivering body. Her raspy breath broke through the coolness of the winter air steadily smoky under the midnight moon.

The red sweater that once seemed so warm and comforting suddenly became a conspicuous alien clinging to her back, a beckoning beacon to the truck and its driver. The slam of an all too close truck door dropped Jule to her knees. Burying her face in the snow, her shivering soon subsided as she began to blend with the chilled environment around her.

Then she did it.

Her fragile body went limp and cold with the inviting snow beneath her. The lifeless bushes nearby reached out to hide her. All was dark. All was cold. She was still.

Her Town (working title) - Chapter 1: The Beginning

Jule tore into the cold. The harsh wind nipped at her heels as she swept quickly, lightly into the deep forest surrounding her. The shadowed moon above lapped at her small footprints in the brittle, frozen snow as naked limbs snagged at her loosely hanging dress.

She was running. Running into the vast known. What laid beyond these trees wasn't a figurative fresh crop of new beginnings; no, what laid behind this soulless forest was a consecutive sequence of inconsequential -literal- crops. And down those dusty roads lining the hapless fields of cheap corn and soy beans, she knew she would only find a town that had vacuumed the innocuous hopes and dreams of all that came before her.

Thoughts callously turned in the girl's mind. The possibility of escaping this vortex of hopeless resignation to a life with which she felt she could do so much more gave her thoughts a veracity personified in the speed of her run.

Jule's dreams do not belong to this particular story though. The possession of this story is the town itself - all it held within and with all it kept outside.