Ladybug Ashes

Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home.

Your house is on fire, your children are gone.

All except one; her name is Anne.

She has crept under the frying pan.

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Introduction

The sun rose on a small Victorian British village. The birds were chirping, the bees were beginning to buzz, flowers were beginning to bloom, and a small house and it's occupants were slowly beginning to burn in their rooms from a fire that wasn't there a few moments ago. The Coccinelle family; a small, tidy family that were kind but quiet, the kind of family who never does anything wrong, and doesn't ever really think that anything bad could happen to them. The family consists of the mother, Rosette de Francis-Coccinelle, a young french woman who really doesn't matter to this story at all at this moment in time, besides her burning, the father, Charles Coccinelle, an english businessman who also doesn't particularly matter right now, and the children: Jaqueline, aged  14 years, Karen, aged 9 years, and Anne- Marie, aged 6 years. 

Jaqueline was practically perfect in every way. She did her housework before dusk, she fed the ducks that came to the pond behind the house, she patched up her and her sister's clothes, and she was seen, not heard. Very quiet and petite, a mirror image of her mother. Karen was a very good child, too. She kept her clothes and room clean, she remembered her manners, and she helped to cook the evening supper when she was allowed. Karen was a favorite of the village where they lived, a beautiful flower in a small, dull field. Anne- Marie, however, was not like either of her sisters. She was not tidy. She was not charming. She was most certainly not quiet. Anne- Marie Cooccinelle was one of the most persistent, bluntly honest, mind-blowingly messy children in the village, and one of the most imaginative. When Jaqueline went to feed the ducks each day, quiet and calm as she always was, young little Anne would come traipsing up to the water, trying to catch the feeding ducks, often landing herself in the water. Jaqueline would take her back, quietly clean her up with help from Karen, and send her to bed with Mother for a bedtime story.

However, the fire changed the family. 

Rosette burned besides her husband. They were hardly awake, and went as peacefully as they could while choking on smoke and burning alive. Meaning not peaceful at all. Almost the polar opposite, in fact. Jaqueline did slightly better, managing to make her way to the front door before her burns became to great, parts of her skin already charred from the heat. She died almost two minutes before fire fighters from the town opened the door, her charred body still reaching for the door when they opened it. Karen and Anne-Marie, who shared a room on the main level of the house, had managed to open the one window they had. Being as she was, Karen lifted her sister out the window first. "Run. Run as fast as you can, sister. Run to the forest, or to the town, I don't know." She paused in her words, hacking on smoke. "Just run, sister." Though she hesitated, little Anne ran to the town as her sister tried to pull herself through the window. But she was weak, and the fire was strong. She died like the others.

Anne-Marie ran miraculously fast for a girl with smoke in her lungs and burns on her legs. Afterwards, the people who saw her running would say that it seemed like she still had the fire nipping at her feet, and that she would run to the end of the earth before she'd rest. She didn't, of course. She grew tired just as anyone else would, and collapsed in front of the small pharmacy of the town. She wouldn't wake there; the owner brought her to the small town orphanage in the night. As Anne slept, words spun  through her head; not just any words, but a nursery rhyme that her parents would sing to her at night. The tune would change, but the words always stayed; "Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home...."

13 years later.