Morning Star
The mornings often felt eerie this time of year. Thick mist drifted by like wayward clouds and clung to the tall grass. The days hadn’t yet matured to their full length, and twilight still kissed the horizon. Even the first sprigs of a flowering Spring were muddied by the bluescape. My breath came out in puffs, mingling with the fog, and the sky was awash with shades of grey and lavender. The only color that could not be dulled, was the bright red of my worn rain boots. They seemed to glow like a beacon against the yellow grass and grey dirt. I pinched my shawl closer against my neck as the morning chill started to seep in, and began picking my way through the field. The tall grass tickled the exposed skin of my calf that my gathered skirts left bare, but I hardly noticed. Beyond the veil of mist and fog, a spatter of stars still freckled the sky. Many dusks I’d spent beneath them, casting my hopes upwards, praying they’d catch like a fly in a web. Alas, nothing seemed to change. I often wondered if my wishes never came true because they faded with the morning light. So it seems, night stars would never become morning suns, though I never stopped dreaming, even with my eyes open. Some things never change.
I could feel the numbness spreading across my fingers, turning them to a shade that matched my squeaky boots. Without slowing my determined pace, I knotted my fingers further into my pinned-up skirts, trying for warmth. Some days, it felt like the sun would never come, but alas, the sky began to rosy, and a flicker on the horizon told me, as it always did, that morning was coming like hot gossip on a summer day. I quickened my pace, no longer caring about the spreading stiffness in my lower limbs. Bursts of blood orange and gold haloed the line between today and tomorrow, and I ran towards it. Hope often felt this way, breathless and trying, but my feet carried me anyway, on and on, skidding to a stop only in time to send a shower of rocks tumbling down, the ravine below catching their fall, as Hell caught Lucifer.
The ghost of the moon hung against a backdrop of flaming reds and dying purples. Low clouds caught shades of marigold and persimmon. And there, on the edge of tomorrow, rose the only star which ever seemed to grant wishes.