He wrote poetry by a cracked window, ink freezing between stanzas. His hands shook not from cold, but from hunger, from ambition. Below, she shoveled coal into a furnace that never thanked her. Black powder clung to her lungs and her lashes.
They met in the stairwell between classes and chimneys. He asked her if her song was a hymn or a spell. She shrugged, smiled with broken teeth, and asked if he was always this sad in silence.
He read her verses aloud in the hollow hour before dawn. She didn’t understand all the words, but she understood the ache. He didn’t know the tune she hummed while scrubbing her boots, but it stayed in his dreams for years.
They kissed once. Not like lovers. Like people who could not afford to be.
One became published. The other vanished in a mining collapse never recorded. But his final poem began with the line: “There once was a girl who lit fires in my chest and coal in the world.”