Pink Skies Her hair flew back into her face as the wind tried to whip it back in the other direction. She couldn’t look back. Not know. ONot never. She had left her whole #life behind her and if she turned around, the memories would throw themselves at her forcing her to go back and retrieve them. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t stay at that awful place any longer. She was now starting a new #life for herself that she wanted no one she knew to be a part of. She left that awful place because of the people. They hurt her. She knew she couldn’t wait very long until something bad would happen so she packed the few things she owned and walked out the front door. The road she took was long. Just the way it should be. She thought about her journey as she walked it. Eventually she wound up in a small town with freshly cut grass and close-to-perfect buildings lined up in a row. She walked into the first store meeting a man named Earl. He gave her a few sticks of bread and let her explore her new surroundings. She walked down the street on a perfectly paved side walk. There was very little road for people to drive on. In fact, there were no cars at all, people walked everywhere. Everything was so different here, the air was crisp and the grass was all cut the same length. Her old #life was filled with musty air a nd cracked concrete that nobody cared to fill. People seemed to care here. She walked down the perfectly straight street, up to the perfectly even steps and in to a house of a mother and her daughter. They greeted her with smiles and welcomed her to eat dinner with them. Her favorite. Soup with potatoes. A small delicacy in her old #life that was hard to come by. Everything in this town seemed to be so perfect. After that she thanked the two and left, only to find that her small bag with her belongings was nowhere to be found. The only memoir of her other #life. She also noticed that the sky was no longer a hard blue, but a frail light pink. And the flowers were always the same red color. She thought this to be funny, the pink was the color of the dress that she wore to a play, the only true happiness from her old #life, and the red was the color of the velvet lined seats that filled her with the brim with eagerness. She looked up at the pink sky, and took a deep breathe to capture the moment in her mind. On the third day, she had fit in just fine with her new #life. She lived and worked with Earl, who turned out to be a better person then she thought he would be. Earl taught her things she would’ve never learned in her old #life, like sewing buttons or fixing up things that were so broken she didn’t even think were fixable. She had soup and potatoes every night. Somebody she knew had arrived on the fourth day, she saw her just for a second, she called her name, and her friend looked around, screamed, and ran. But before she could get very far her friend started to fade, she became blurry and disappeared before she was able to reach the end of the perfect sidewalk. Nobody seemed to notice. On the seventh day, she was organizing pins and buttons, nothing else kept her busy enough, until a figure walked through the door. The man’s face was wrinkled and eyes heavy set. She froze. It was her grandpa. But he had died three years ago. ©kaitlynmb