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Hazel Faye Bennet was the kind of girl who lit cigarettes off the burning wreckage of her own life.
She was the stickiness of honey in the summer heat, cinnamon dust on your lips, the warmth of whiskey burning in your chest. She was the bruised sweetness of forgotten days, the taste of sweat and saltwater, too wild to stay and too heavy to leave behind.
She was the flicker of headlights on a highway no one takes anymore, the silence before a storm rolls in, a prayer whispered in a field where nothing grows.
A slow hymn, soft and sharp all at once, echoing through the empty places of a town that never knew her.
The summer air hung heavy, thick with the smell of dry earth and dying grass—the kind of heat that clung to your skin and settled deep in your bones.
Pine Hollow was suffocating like that—no breeze, no movement, just stillness, as if the whole town was trapped under a glass dome, preserved in time but slowly decaying.
Every street felt like a dead end. Every face, familiar but faded, as if life had long since drained out of the place, leaving behind only the echoes of dreams that never quite made it out.
Hazelsat on the hood of her rusted car, a cigarette burning between her fingers, the embers flaring briefly in the dim light. The sun was nearly gone, the last stretch of pink and gold streaking across the sky like a wound.
She watched it bleed out over the horizon, her eyes narrowing against the glow. Another day gone, she thought.
Her reflection wavered in the side mirror—eyes dark and wide, lips stained with last night's lipstick, her expression set somewhere between bored and resigned.
