Chapter 3: Where is the heart in a house?

Jule moaned to life in the arms of a very familiar stranger. The mutterings of the gruff gray man carrying her sunk her heart to the depths of her stomach, and the possibilities wrought by the shadowed moon sank with it.

Jule's futile escape had provided only the briefest taste of independence with which she once again had the ability to act of her own accord ... although her own accord seemed to have brought her right back to where she started. His house - though house does it too much justice. Dwelling place? Cave perhaps. It was built with drafty walls that provided little protection from weather and the decorations consisted of a beaver skin, a couple of raccoon pellets and a deer head. The deer's beady eyes disgusted her and existed to remind her of their shared prison; however, she was the living trophy. The deer - a more misfortuned prize.

Gray Man carried Jule into the house, catching her hair on the log door frame. Not noticing, he snagged the tendrils and jauntily continued into the house. Jule noticed the pull little more than the man as she tried to connect her disjointed thoughts. She couldn't recall what had spurred her desperate escape, and the harder she tried to bring back those recent memories the more it seemed sleep was all that would entertain her thoughts. Darkness enveloped her once more though this time not as cold or perilous.

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.