Alexa Daskalakis

Scene: Ashfall​

After everything burned, she came back for what the fire couldn’t take.

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The camera moves slowly.

A field of blackened grass stretches under a colorless sky. Ash drifts like snow, soft and slow, coating everything in a fine gray hush. In the distance, skeletal trees claw upward, their bark scorched and peeling.

A rusted tricycle lies overturned beside a dry, cracked well. The chain dangles. The bell is missing.

⸻

A figure walks into frame.

A woman. Mid-thirties. Boots caked in soot. A coat two sizes too big, cinched at the waist with frayed rope. Her breath fogs, but she doesn’t shiver. A thin strip of cloth covers her mouth. Her eyes are dry.

She stops beside the tricycle.

Bends.

Brushes ash from the seat with the back of her glove, careful, like she’s touching memory.

Pauses.

Leaves it as it was.

⸻

She moves on.

A barbed wire fence—half-fallen. She ducks beneath it, slow, practiced. Her boot catches on a strand, but she doesn’t curse or flinch. She just lifts, steps through, and keeps going.

Up ahead, a house.

Or what remains of one.

The roof collapsed inward. One wall intact. The chimney leans.

She kneels.

Not inside, but near the foundation, where the earth dips unnaturally.

Digs.

Not desperately. Not even urgently. Just… precisely.

⸻

A glint.

Metal.

She pulls out a box—wood, scorched at the corners, wrapped once in oilcloth now brittle with time.

She opens it.

Inside: a photograph, half-melted at the edges. A child’s drawing. A silver ring.

She doesn’t react.

Just presses the box to her chest, closes her eyes, and bows her head—not in prayer, but in gravity.

⸻

Above her, ash keeps falling.

Behind her, something stirs in the trees.

She doesn’t turn. Doesn’t run.

She stays.

⸻

Fade out.