Mary Janelle--more commonly called MJ--snapped her book shut as the siren blared through the streets of Sherborne like the sound of oncoming doom. Again?

The air raids were getting more frequent and she seemed to spend more time in the bunker than she did above ground. She ground her jaw together, remembering her mother's words to her just last week: some people have it worse, we should be grateful.

It was hard to be grateful when every day brought threat of death and the end of everything you knew and loved. The war had taken her father, her uncle, her two elder brothers, and had mentally destroyed her mother. It would not take her home too.

MJ tucked the book under her arm and gathered up her skirts, picking her way across the cobblestone as men and women raced in panic all around her. She kept her pace. If the Nazis were really going to bomb Sherborne, then it wouldn't be for at least another thirty minutes or so. She had time to walk.

In fact...MJ glanced up at the long row of houses. She could see her house now, its white stone and beautiful red shingles standing out amongst the dull grey of the other houses and their bland, brown roofs.

She smiled.

She had enough time to read.

MJ settled down on the steps of the pharmacy and cracked open her book again. She had read Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Hugo, Austen, and Brontë. But there was something magical about the way Homer portrayed Odysseus.

She ran her fingers lovingly down the page, a smile beginning to creep across her face, as shrieks resounded all around her and she slipped into a world that was entirely her own.

She was a magician, transforming a homesick man's crew into pigs out of spite and protectiveness. She was a queen, watching from her balcony as her land was torn apart by greed and despair, praying to the gods for her husband to come home. She was a king--tortured by a longing to get home, but unable to get there.

Minutes ticked by.

Screams grew quieter.

There was hardly a sound except the flipping of pages and the lock of the last bunker doors.

The village of Sherborne waited with bated breath.

Suddenly, the air was filled with the whirs of airplane engines. MJ looked up, half wonder and half terror filling her face at the tangled mass of aircraft that enshrouded the atmosphere.

MJ cursed the fog, wishing she could see the planes better. She clasped her book to her chest and stepped backwards, hoping she could melt into the walls--as if that would prevent the Nazis from dropping their bombs.

"MJ! Get o'er 'ere!" Henry the pharmacist's heavily accented voice pierced through the noise of the aircraft and broke MJ from her spell. The wonder dissipated and only terror remained. She bounded up the steps and through the pharmacy door, hurtling herself towards the bunker that laid so close, yet so far.

She watched as Henry's great, whiskered face disappeared into the floor and she slipped inside beside it. The bunker was tight with Henry's wife, Betty, and their four children, but there was enough room in the corner to fit her.

The noise of the craft grew louder.

It resounded through their ears.

It pierced their hearts.

It throbbed in their veins.

Henry struggled with the lock on the bunker, but it finally slid into place and he settled down beside his wife, chest heaving. MJ glanced at Katheryne, Henry's youngest, who clung to Betty and shrieked in fear.

"Shh," Betty whispered, stroking Katheryne's head in an attempt to calm her.

But then it happened.

It was the loudest thing MJ had ever heard. A deep, rolling thud that seemed to bury itself into the very core of the earth. More than hear it, however, she felt it. It shook the walls and vibrated through every cell in her body.

The men and women in the bunker froze. Silence encapsulated everything.

Then the sounds grew worse.

The sound of death.

The snapping of beams as if they were toothpicks. The shattering of glass. The crumbling of stone.

No human voices pierced the silence.

There was no time for the dying to scream.

There was no breath in the lungs of the living to spare.

The air tasted of stale earth and rusted metal. She could smell the fear that hung in the air: it smelled like blood.

Another detonation and the walls trembled worse than the first, dust sprinkled down from the ceiling and scattered across their faces. The children sobbed quietly, their breaths coming in short hiccups.

MJ stared at the flickering bulb of light that hung from the ceiling, every sound that followed making her wonder if that was her house. Then the bulb went out and they were plunged in a darkness worse than death.

After that all she could do was count.

She ticked off on her fingers the number of rattling explosions that cracked through Sherborne. Tears silently streamed down her face as each second took the breath from her chest and seemed to crush her heart.

When she reached 90, she stopped counting.

It felt like years before the noises stopped, and a few extra seconds for the dust to stop seeping through the cracks in the ceiling.

MJ was frozen.

She didn't speak.

She didn't move.

She hardly breathed.

Seven pairs of grief-glazed eyes stared at each other in the darkness, hardly knowing what to do.

Henry moved first.

He eased open the bunker door and blinked rapidly as dust cascaded onto his face. No, not dust. Ash.

Smoke choked the air and stung her senses.

Betty wrapped her arms protectively around her sobbing children and shared a glance with her husband that said more than words ever could.

MJ followed Henry out.

She wasn't sure how she got her joints to move, but move they did. They pulled her instinctively out of the bunker and into the grey light of a morning that would never be forgotten.

It was quiet. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that follows a catastrophe and steals all the words from your mind. It was a deathly quiet.

The door of the bunker opened into a heap of desecrated stone and shattered beams. The pharmacy was gone.

MJ watched as Henry pulled his family from the shadows of the pit, face drawn tight at the sight of his life's work razed before him.

She realized then how much ash and soot coated her skin. Betty sobbed chokingly and wrapped pale, trembling arms around her husband's neck.

It was a sight that could issue tears from the stoutest soldier, but then she turned and looked over her village--or what was left of her village--and she forgot everything else.

Tears rolled off her cheeks and splattered on the blackened street. The houses were a heap of beams and stone that stuck out of the ground like the splintered bones of giants. Entire roofs were cracked open like eggshells or cast onto the street, like a child's discarded plaything. Where once there were windows now there were only holes--not broken, but absent, leaving shards of glass like jagged teeth in the cracked frames. Doors were hanging off their hinges and creaking in a grieving wind.

Worse than that was the smell. The sharp scent of fire and smoke, the earth-like taste of dust in the air, and something sharp and acrid: the scent of a ruptured gas line.

Men and women were crawling from their bunkers, gazing with hollow eyes and soot-covered, strained features at what was left of their quaint village. They were moving like they were underwater, dazed and slow as if caught in a trance.

Perhaps they were.

MJ hardly noticed that The Odyssey was still pressed tightly to her chest, but as she bent down to pick up a little girl's doll that laid in the ashes the pages of the paperback crumpled against her body.

She looked down, hands trembling as she peeled the book away from her. MJ choked out a sob, a tear splashing against the cover and absorbing a tiny speck of ash that clung to it.

The citizens of Sherborne began to pick through the ruins, eyes flitting between the grey sky that was thick with settling debris and the horrific reality that laid before them on the ground.

MJ's eyes scoured up and down the streets, frowning at the eerie contrast of an untouched home beside three that were hardly more than rubble. Her eyes locked on a ruin made of white stone and red roof shingles and she gasped, a knot tightening in her throat.

No.

It couldn't be true.

MJ walked, haunted, towards what was once her entire world. The beams of her once-beautiful house laid snapped at her feet and the stones were crushed.

The Odyssey slipped from her hand.

"Mama?" MJ screamed, her voice sounding alien in the stillness. When she saw it--saw her--she wanted to scream.

But no sound would come out.

All ability to speak was wrenched from her and she tore towards the beam that laid over the body like she could do something about it.

MJ pried in vain against the beam. She scraped and pulled and pushed against it until blood streamed down her fingers and her chest was knotted in pain.

She groped silently for the cold, yet burnt hand of her mother...and she wrapped her fingers around it.

MJ bowed her head, unaware what to do.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw the blackened but intact pages of a notebook. Her notebook. The notebook. MJ let out a sound that was not unlike a moan and crawled towards it, not giving a care to the splinters and shards of rock and glass that cut her hands and knees.

She reached the notebook and wrapped soot-coated fingers around it.

How?

Why?

What gave it the right to survive, to keep her fantastical dreams alive, when everything else was taken from her?

She pressed the book against the ruined stone, her grief tearing through her in nauseating waves as she flipped through it.

"Once upon a time..."

The words made her sick.

She gritted her teeth together, squeezing her eyes shut until a piercing pain split through her skull. But she did not open them.

One by one she tore apart what once was her dream.

She shredded the pages that held her thoughts, her dream, and her story.

When she opened her eyes, the journal was desecrated before her, hardly ten pages left inside its tight, leather binding. She ran her hands stiffly across the shredded pieces of paper that laid all around her.

Suddenly, something inside of her opened and the last shreds of denial gave way to grief.

MJ let out a sob.

She absently reached for a piece of wood shrapnel, blackened and scarcely more than a hunk of coal. She placed it to the untouched pages of her notebook.

And with trembling hands, she wrote.

She wrote in a scrawl that was too big, too dark, and too messy to be hers. The lines of her letters were pressed so viciously into the paper that the piece of wood snapped beneath the pressure.

So she grabbed another one.

She groped about through the ruins of her childhood home and gathered all the scraps of coal she could find.

With tears streaming down her face and anger coursing through her veins, she wrote a story.

She searched for the familiar escape that writing always brought her. It didn’t come.

Instead, every word that she penned down seemed to lash her more firmly to the world. It seemed to impress ever more the truth of her surroundings.

Finally, MJ came to the end of the notebook. She breathed out a deep, heavy sigh and wrote one final line.

I've learned now: books don't stop bombs, dreams don't hold back death, and stories don't bring people home.

MJ let out a gasp that was filled with more emotion than she thought possible of possessing. She pressed the last period to the page and her hand trembled.

The coal snapped.

She shut the notebook.