Donna

Ding ding. A girl enters the Hide Out, a 24 hour dinner on the side of an Ohio highway. She has shadowed green eyes, dampened with a maturity she should not have. Her fragile but smooth limbs carry her to the cracked red diner stool, its chrome leg the only thing keeping it from collapsing under her.

The dull, lifeless waitress glances at her, her deep set beady eyes evaluating, calculating. She asks what she can get the girl, and the girl, her personality warm but cold at the same time, simply request a black coffee. As the waitress, Donna, gets her coffee from a grimy machine, the girl takes a tattered journal from her tattered bag and lays it on the tattered counter.

The journal has a pentagram on it, and Donna vaguely wonders if she's satanic, but decides not to think further of it. She watches as the words flow from the girls pencil, the graphite and lead bleeding from the wood, making words sprawl across the page with ease.  She writes a page, then turns the journal sideways and writes over the words, mixing them.

Donna vaguely recalls this form of writing, crosshatching, from an old English class she took in college and never received a credit for, since she promptly dropped out a year after studying to be a nurse. She realizes she will never have a job that helps people and her already sour mood worsens considerably.

        She pushes the bitter coffee across the counter to the girl, the chipped mug catching on the cracked counter before continuing on. The girl slowly stops the flow of words and closes the journal, and very carefully she tucks her poor battered journal into her ratty canvas bag before slinging it over her back and taking a hefty swig of the coffee.

        Her adams apple bobs as she drinks the sour liquid down. She looks more alive after, her waxy white skin letting off a soft glow of life, all provided from that sour substance. Her disheveled dull blonde hair fell in soft locks around her pale oval face, taut with a hunger that would never be satisfied. Her long skirt brushed the ground, the cloth as black as the coffee and her thin sweater as pink as her frost bitten cheeks. Her scuffed up combat boots swung softly, grazing the ground and making tiny black marks with each swing.

        Her slender fingers reach in her bag to pull out the dollar she owed for the bitter grimy coffee, and Donna stops her by saying it's on the house. The girl's gaze shifts to her, and her hard green eyes melt to pools of soft emerald. Her full lips chapped by the cold, quirk into a slight smile, and Donna wishes she had the simple beauty this mysterious girl possesses.

        She secures her bag on her thin boney shoulders, and gracefully slides out of the cracked stool. She stand, her tall frame glowing with the dim lights of the diner, and with a last grateful glace, glides towards the door. As she pushes her frail body against the door, Donna stops her with one last question.

        "Who are you?"

        "The girl you could've been."

        Donna watches her lean frame glide along the highway until her fragile figure disappears from sight, along with the last piece of Donna's sanity.