Xiaye

"The cot’s rusted springs screamed in protest as I pushed back my threadbare blanket and stood up. Four strides took me across my father’s small concrete bunker, unchanged in thirty years save for the moss that sprouted from cracks where the ground outside the walls and ceiling had shifted. I dipped cupped hands into a water barrel in the corner and splashed frigid water onto my face and through my long, dark hair, shivering against the cold.

Staring into the barrel, I studied my gaunt face reflected in the rippling surface of the liquid. My heterochromatic eyes stared back—the left one silver as the stars, the right one blue as the summer sky. My fair skin looked as gray as the macabre stone surrounding me. I could’ve passed as decently pretty if I hadn’t been starving. Granted, my twenty-three years had done nothing to bathe my cheeks in the glow of youth. Trauma had turned the glint in my eyes to sadness and built muscles out of necessity, not health."