icon

She wondered what it was like, to grow up believing in something more than dirt and air.  It had been years since all icons had been outlawed.   They said the images gave people too much hope.  She laughed.  Hope.  She remembered the last time she felt something remotely close.  She was in line with her father for a piece of bread.  Her father held her hand and told her not to let go.  The crowd submerged them in arms, legs, bodies.  She had held tight until the alarm sounded.  Then the bodies moved in a panic.  They moved in herds towards the shelters, pulling like tides in opposite directions.  She had been knocked over and trampled by feet, no one bothered to look down.  The sea of bodies and colors parted and a hand reached from the sky for her.  Blood had trickled into her eyes, burning, blurring her vision.  She closed them and leaned against the stranger.  She awoke in a shelter, surrounded by strangers, without her father, no idea who had helped her.  She glanced at the remaining, fading scars on her arms.  She picked up a handful of dirt, slowly letting it trickle through her fingertips.  This is what she knew.  She tried to clear her head of useless thoughts of stories she heard in whispers on the wind. She glanced at her hand and remembered the tight grip she had lost.  Cursing the dirt for her watering eyes, she started her day.