Earth Away

Third Place, Atlantis Dreamweave Storytelling Festival Microfiction Contest, 2019

The girl stood in the middle of the dirt road. She could hear the roaring factory in front of her, and she could smell the hair burning on the heads of the workers throwing fuel into the flames. The dirty brick wall topped with barbed wire towered over her. She stretched out her arms. She looked up into the shadow.

She had been coming for weeks, now, standing and waiting for that shadow to disappear. Just on the other side, her family was there, waiting for her. She could hear their shuffling feet in the dirt through the thick prison-like wall between them. But they didn’t call for her, even though she was right there, just a few feet away, separated by a wall of dry clay, only some earth away.

The road was deserted, and the girl waited for hours. No one came to save her, no one came to scold her. She left only when the siren sounded, and the factory chimneys cooled down, and the smell of singed hair faded into the humid evening air. She left her handprint on the wall, a promise that she would come back and listen to their shuffling feet and their silence, until she was brave enough to bring a ladder, or old enough to watch it crumble, or lucky enough to be thrown inside.