What Remains of Summer Kraus

They say she once slept under stars,
but never quite beneath the sky.
The roof above her wasn't shelter,
more a mouth that learned to lie.
A girl named Summer, soft and strange,
with fingers inked from borrowed books,
who danced with shadows in the basement,
and left her shoes on crooked hooks.
She didn't cry. Not like you'd think.
She cracked in colours, slow, discreet.
She'd lace her silence into ribbons,
then tie them tight around her feet.
The village whispered: odd, that child,
with windows drawn inside her head,
who flinched when footsteps climbed the stairs,
but smiled like she'd already fled.
They never saw behind the door,
the one with paint chipped at the knob.
They never saw the way he grinned
or how the house forgot to sob.
He was a man of hands and hunger,
who spoke in praises dipped in tar.
He loved her most when no one looked.
He loved her best beneath the stars.
But Summer, Summer grew a plan.
She fed it seeds, and fear, and frost.
She carved a map into her spine,
and named each scar the path she’d lost.
She played pretend. She stitched a doll.
She sewed its mouth with thread and charm.
She whispered, "You can’t hurt me now,
Not while the woods still take the harmed."
Then one cold dusk, with no goodbye,
no shattered glass, no sign of fight,
she vanished through a paper door,
folded from pages torn from night.
They searched. They knocked. They rang the bell.
But silence met them, still and proud.
Just one red thread across the bed,
and thunder stitched into the cloud.
Now years have passed. The house remains.
Its boards still hum in minor keys.
The man grew old. The windows weep.
The crows sit lower in the trees.
But sometimes, on the edge of dusk,
when moths begin their quiet chase,
a girl in ribbons walks the field,
her shadow long, but not erased.
What remains of Summer Krause?
A tale too sharp to hold in prose.
A girl who turned her hurt to wind.
A rose that bloomed beneath the snow.