Hi everyone. I know it's been a while since I posted anything but this just came to me. Thanks for looking it over, RoseyUnicorn.
It's 825 words. Suggestions welcome. Tear it up. 
“Sometimes that mountain you’ve been climbin’ is just a grain of sand.” Carrie Underwood’s “So Small” sung from a passing car, so slow you’d think they’d be out for a Sunday drive but it was Tuesday and the middle of the night.
I thought about that verse as I walked along the highway, the rain pouring down on my already-frizzy hair. Comparing my own life to the song, I remembered all those “mountains” I’d had to climb up until a few days ago. When I reached the top, I wasn’t even a grain of sand. I was a prehistoric organism, so tiny that you could barely see I was there, including with a microscope. I was sitting on the top of the mountain, abused and beaten, unsure of where to go next, when I’d been squashed for the last time.
That’s why I was walking along the highway. I’d packed all of my belongings in my backpack and started down the lonely road that lead for thousands of miles. I’d been down this road before many, many times. Only this time, I actually had a destination.
If you asked anyone else where I was going, they’d probably say that I was stupid—that I was relying off memory from eleven years ago and that she probably doesn’t even live there anymore. But, if you asked me, I’d tell you it made perfect sense. I was heading north, to a small town near Chicago, a good five-hundred miles from my house in South Carolina. The only best friend I’d ever had, a girl named Annebelle, lived in a small house there, which I remembered from the picture her mom had taken and sent in her one and only letter. I clutched the picture in my jacket, thinking back to the day when it arrived.
I was five years old and we still lived in a picture-perfect white cottage house in Texas. Mom was sitting in a fold-up chair, smoking, wrinkles seeping into her skin so that she looked sixty instead of only thirty, while Dad laid on the couch nearby, still clutching a beer bottle, with many other empty ones near. She flipped through the mail with her empty hand, automatically throwing out the bills, while I looked longingly at a picture Anne’s Mom had taken of us before she moved. Mom looked up and glared at me. Between puffs of smoke, she told me,
“Stop pinin’ after the girl. She was your friend and now she’s gone. How many times have I told you that people are like the wind? They come and they go, as often as they please, and don’t give a damn if they leave or hurt you. They just move on and you’re left behind, pickin’ up the pieces. I’ll be damned if I let any daughter of mine be the one left behind. You sure as hell better be the one to leave. Remember that, if you don’t remember anything else I’ve taught you.”
I nodded.
“Yes, Clarice.” I put the picture down.
“Speakin’ of the devil.” She handed me the letter from Anne. I took it and looked up at her.
“What’s this?” I couldn’t read yet, which bothered me, especially at a time like that.
“It’s from that girl. What was her name? Mary? Louise?”
“Annebelle.” I spoke quietly. She threw her free arm in the air.
“Well, whatever her name was, she and her prissy mother sent you a letter. Go on and read it.”
I looked down at the ground and could feel her staring at me.
“I can’t read yet.” Looking up, I could see her eyes flaring.
“What do you mean you ‘can’t read yet’?! Didn’t they teach you in that damn school of yours?”
“Not yet.”
She didn’t say anything and let me tear open the envelope. A picture immediately fell out of a house, with my best friend standing beside it. I picked it up as Mom began to read the letter after taking it from me.
“’Hi Katelyn. This is Annebelle. Mommy is writing this but I’m telling her what to say. This is a picture of our new house. It’s really pretty and big like a mall. Mommy says it’s tiny but I think it’s big. I hope you write back soon and are doing well. Love, always, Annebelle Lee Smit.’”
Mom put down the letter.
“What a shitty letter. Obviously, her mother helped her.”
I looked up at her, hopeful.
“Can I write her back?”
Mom’s face turned red.
“Why would you even ask such a thing?! Of course you can’t.”
With that, she took the picture of Annebelle and I, and put it in an ashtray, which she immediately set on fire.
“Like I said, Kate, people are like the wind.”
I sat and watched the picture burn, long after it was gone, feeling small and lost, like a tiny flame that flickers and can’t decide whether to go out or stay.
Like, I'm feeling as if you should dramatize this, perhaps have the words waft out of a passing car, float on the wind, or some other creative description.
I absolutely love "So Small," and I like how you put it into the story. But it seems like it's only there in the beginning, and then it's Poof! No more!
