Sharon McNeill

Ashes

Ashes That was the year the sky fell. It drifted around them in pieces, some clumps as big as mittens, others like eyelashes, feather-light. For all the world like silver snow. But of course, it didn’t get cold enough to snow much later, after the sun stayed blocked and the sky was a steady, righteous gray. After the caldera erupted, fire, water, earth, air combusted and merged, covering the browngold world to create this new one – cold, wet, dark.