A Pool of Brown: Chapter One

(Lucy)

I wake up to find that outside is chaos, after all, it is war time and enemy planes were bombing the town like mad. Everyone is heading to their bomb shelters in their backyards, my sister screams for me to wake up; she was crying and looked scared. I wasn't used to seeing Susan like this, it was disconcerting. She was usually so calm and collected, but now she was scared and sobbing. I've never seen her cry, not even when Daddy had to go to war; she's always so calm and collected.

"Lucy they're bombing the town! We need to get into the bomb shelter. NOW!" she yells, it is actually quite frightening. Well not so much the bombing as Susan—now she was scary, it's like she wasn't Susan at all.

I quickly get out of bed and slide my worn slippers on before running to the bomb shelter with Susan. When we get there Mum tells me to rest and wait until the bombs stop. Then we will leave on the train to the professor's house in the morning with two boys.

I have been wondering who we were going with all week; Mum told us when they first started the bombing on our town. It's too dangerous here and we need to go out to the country and get away from the war like all the other kids. Susan has been okay with it and has convinced me that we needed to leave now or we could die, and Mum would be fine. She is a grown woman after all.

But I still don't like the idea of living with strangers at a weird mansion in the middle of nowhere. No I don't like it at all; I'm only doing this because Susan's going and my mum wants me out of trouble, only for them.

Also because I'm a little bit curious about the boy that is near my age, that was all Mum had told me that one boy was a year older than Susan and the other, one year older than me.

So I slept, quite well, might I add, for someone that's having a war going on above their head. I dreamt of a boy, he had jet black hair, a face that was splattered with freckles that suited him nicely. But the thing I couldn't stop looking at were his eyes, a deep chocolate brown that I practically fell into. We were in a strange place that oddly I knew my way around, it was snowing lightly, not too heavy but enough so that it was a storm. Just snowing it must have been winter; it couldn't have been summer, it was too cold for it to be anything but winter. The boy was smiling now, smiling at me. I felt myself smile back knowing that we were going to be great friends.

But sadly it was only a dream and when I wake up I feel myself smiling. My smile crumples when I realize that it was only a dream and that boy didn't exist. It is still night time; I keep thinking about the boy I had dreamt about, his eyes, they were a pool of brown; I wanted to meet him but I knew he was just a dream—but I could keep reliving him in my head. All too soon it's dawn and we have to leave for the station, we quickly pick up our suitcases and creep out from the shelter into the yard. What we see is discouraging. Most of the neighborhood's houses are gone and in their places were giant holes, but our house is only half gone. Our house was a big house, you might call it too big, but we still thought it home nonetheless. Some people, who had just woken too and had been curious were staring at the ruins, most are crying. I start to cry as well, our home is destroyed!

Even if it is only half gone, it's enough to make me cry. Then I look up and see a boy staring at me from across the street. He looks familiar, I wonder who it is for a minute and then it hit me; it was the boy that I had dreamed about last night. I am just about to walk over there and ask who he is when he starts walking away. I wonder why he was staring at me.

Then mum tells Susan and me that she will make do with the house, and that we have to leave now; otherwise we would miss the train.

I sigh to myself. This is all too much for a ten year old, I miss Daddy and doing the things that made life fun—climbing trees and jumping down into his arms, much to Mum's horror; dancing to the radio with him—I'm quite the waltzer, I'll let you know—and playing with Susan before she started acting like a grownup.

I sigh again and think to myself,

Just hold on a little longer, this war can't last forever.

(A.N. Many, many thanks to for letting me adopt this story. The next chapter of My Warrior Queen is coming up soon as well :D Enjoy!)