Michelle

It was an uncommonly cold Christmas Eve, when a foster child arrived at our door with nowhere to go but a shelter. She was just 14, but wore her age like a woman in her mid-twenties. Jet black hair, a small frame, and eyes so deeply sad they tore at your soul; like stockings filled with coal. For a year she slept in our basement, the music of the pipes above her strange lullaby. She was wild and angry and intensely beautiful. I loved her.