This is my first story so please don't judge.
Hope you enjoy.
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Sorry for the mistakes...
If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea.
One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
My name once meant daughter, grandmother, friend, sishter,beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out: Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am.
WE LIVED in a tiny village in Spain. It is gone now, but then it was called Elcaleflora, the name of lime flower, something bitter and something sweet mixed into one. It was a town that had been my family's home for more than five hundred years, a beautiful village in the most beautiful countryside in all of Aragon.
It began on a hot day.
I was out in the garden when I smelled something burning. Not lime flowers, only pure bitterness. Cores, rinds, pits. That was the way it started. That was the way our world disappeared.
ON THE DAY of the burning, my dearest friend Catalina, ran into our yard and grabbed my hand, urging me to follow her.
Let's run to the plaza, Catalina said. Let's see what's on fire.
Catalina was always curious, always fun. She had a laugh that reminded me of the sound of water. She was shorter than I, but even though my grandmother said Catalina's hair was too curly and her now was bumpy, I thought we looked like sisters.
Catalina and I were so close nothing could come between us. We had been best friends from the time we were babies. When I looked at my friend I saw not only the child she'd been and the girl that she was, but also the woman she was about to be.
Other girls I knew talked behind your back and smile at you falsely. not Catalina. She knew who i was deep inside: I could be lazy sometimes; I believed on true love; I was headstrong and loyal, a friend until the end of time.
Because of our jet-coloured hair, Catalina and I had been given similar pet names as little girls. I had been called Raven and Catalina had been Crow. Our birthday were one week apart, and we had at last turned sixteen. We thought about our futures, how they twined around each other, as if we were two strands of a single braid of fate. Even when we were married women, we planned to live next door to each other. We thought we knew exactly what our lives were made of: still water, not moving river. We thought nothing would ever change.
ON THE BURNING DAY, we raced down to the Plaza,where we always went to fetch water. There was a well in the center of the Plaza,and the water we pulled up in wooden buckets was said to come from heaven. It was sweet and clear and so cold it made us shiver.
To the north stood the old Duke's palace, but he was gone, and our church council reported directly to the king, Ferdinand. The palace was empty, except for the soldiers' barracks and the center where letters could be posted. People said the ghost of the Duke came down to drink cold, clear water on windy nights and that you could hear him if you listened carefully. But today no one was drawing water from the well, not even a ghost. There were scores of men all around, but they hadn't come for water. Soldiers had built a prye out of aged wood. Pine and old forest oak, all of it so dry it burst into flames the moment a lit torch touched the wood.
At first I thought the soldiers were burning doves. White things were rising into the sky. I felt so sad for those poor burning birds, then I realized the burning pile was made of books. Pages flew upward, disappearing, turning to embers and ash, drifting into nothingness.
I saw man with a red circle on his coat, crying. He had a long beard like my grandfather, but my grandfather would never cry, with tears streaming down his beard, there for all to see. The crying man was begging the soldiers not to throw his books on the fire, and they were laughing at him. A guard took a handful of ashes and tossed them onto the old man so that sparks flared all over his coat.
He's from the alajama, Catalina whispered about the old man.
