They might have been fragments of a song, or a poem, its origins and writer lost in the haze of her past and the blizzard that had taken control of her.

In the dying embers
of something old and forgotten
flaring only enough
to cast a final ghostlight of remembrance

Everything changed~
who I was, who I had been
who I might have become~
It was gone as if it never was.

Her head fell back against the cab of the truck. Steve meant what he said. She didn’t need Cherie to tell her that, so why had she taken her aside, to pour out the lies that fell out in hot tears? And what did any of it mean anyway?

“Love like that does not exist,” her excuse half whispered in such bitterness, tears leaving dusty streaks in hastily applied makeup.

But it had existed, in Shane anyway. Cherie would have said it was because she had little to lose. She had nothing before Cherie and whatever she had afterwards didn’t matter. But it wasn’t true. She’d had her armor, her protective wall between herself and a world that meant her no good, held nothing and no one for her. She’d let it fall for Cherie.

In the dying embers,
the last light revealed
long steel tracks
biting hard into the red dirt of all my yesterdays and tomorrows.

Walk along the railbed,
Gravel beneath my boots,
The night air steams with the tang of old creosote
Leaching out of crumbling ties, faded by heat and time.

In the pale light of morning, Shane sat in her truck and watched an angry sunrise glint off the shards of glass. The wreckage of what would have been her shop struck Shane as somehow fittingly elegiac. Cherie’s harsh words still stung, even though somewhere deep in her, where painful knowledge of the truth nested, Shane knew they’d been spoken to drive her away, to a place of safety. But there was no safe place for her, no sanctuary outside the love she’d allowed herself to feel for Cherie.

And a random spike,
Pried out and abandoned,
Lies rusting but not resting
In the deep red dirt beneath the long steel tracks.