The Little Match Girl

The winter raging outside was bitter and harsh, the air full of giant fluttering snowflakes, the sky slowly growing dark. It was the last day of the year, and everyone was getting ready for the festivities of New Year’s Eve.

Well, almost everyone. A little girl with few scraps of clothes and no shoes walked sadly along the streets. She’d left home in slippers, but they belonged to her mother and were still too big for the girl’s tiny feet.

As she hurried through the freshly fallen snow, her feet, already soaking wet after taking a few steps, kept sinking into the white powder and the slippers kept slipping and slipping until, one by one, she lost them both. She knew her mother would be angry with her.

The girl didn’t stop and continued barefoot through the cold snow. Her frostbitten feet were slowly turning from red to blue and her whole body was numb with cold. She shivered and shook, walking forward through the cold wind blowing snow swirls around her.

She carefully carried a huge bunch of matches in a pocket of her loose skirt and held a full matchbox in one of her hands. She usually sold matches in the town every day, but today she was out of luck. No one had bought a single match from her. Not even the kindly neighbour from down the alley.

Hungry and freezing and desperate, she kept roaming the streets of the lit-up town, hoping to come across someone who would buy at least a single match. Just one would make all of the difference.

The snow was heavier and heavier and the fat snowflakes settled on the little girl’s long braided hair, but she hadn’t even noticed that she was all covered in glittering snow. She passed…