Scarlett Wren🥀 D11🥀 WIP

I was born into heat by heat, surrounded in heat. It stays with me on the backs of my forearms through well-worn scars that have stayed with me since ten. Charcoal velvet lines the edges of printed memories, framed in a scrapbook older than I to protect my son and I. So he can never know the heat, and so the heat can’t take all that I have left from me. My thumb traces over each item and suddenly I’m there.

In a place Adair doesn’t know of, and an Eleven I hope he never will come to know. One buried under brimstone and now rotted lumber since the 52nd, bulldozed over by paid workers and erected atop to forget our pain. That street used to be ours, the others my neighbors out there too. But now the roof he had been born under had been reclaimed by soil, floorboards he learned how to walk on uprooted and tossed. And the bed he slept on wasn’t of a box spring, but soil. Veins were replaced by roots, and Eleven had hoped time would heal over them too. And they were right. The victors don’t remember, they young don’t too. The peacekeepers had done their job to keep the peace, but at what cost. Since people like me don’t sleep at night. We have nightmares in hellfire, hoping our young won’t melt away like we did that day.