A Fiction Prose Reflection, Book I of XI

 byChrisWhite – 2025

On the Series:
In this series, we delve into the eleven cardinal virtues: Hope, Charity, Prudence, Kindness, Faith, Love, Temperance, Fortitude, Wisdom, Patience, and Justice, through a synthesis of fictional literary prose and poetry. Each reflection reaches into the marrow of human experience, drawing on both original verse and timeless lines from poets who gave voice to the sacred. In each entry, we explore a virtue not as a static ideal, but as a living force in the human condition, rendered through image, story, and verse. I begin with Hope, the quietest and most stubborn of them all.

There are mornings when the light comes late, languid and leisurely in its entrance, and the house sighs like an old woman folding her grief into silence. On such mornings, a girl walks the winter fields alone, the frost crisping the grass beneath her boots, her hands raw, tucked-gripped in the sleeves of her worn coat. Her name is Ellinor, and though no one calls her by it now, only girl, or you, or nothing, she carries within her a flame that has refused to die, though all the world says it should have.

The air is still. Even the birds have given up their singing instincts.

There is a grave beneath the hawthorn tree. Unmarked. Untouched by anything save time and snow. It is not the grave of a person, but of a thing once alive, a dream, maybe. A promise. Or just that old companion, Hope, who sleeps where sorrow laid her down.

Once, Ellinor knelt there every morning and whispered the poem she was taught by her mother, who had learned it from hers. Now she only thinks it, barely muttered in her mind, as if memory itself is made of the residue of life.

Hope lies cold where roses fade,
Silent now, where once it grew…

She does not speak the rest. Not aloud. But something stirs under the silence.

In the town below, an old mining place with shuttered windows and a clock that no longer chimes, there are those who say Hope is a fool’s virtue. That it is best to live unexpecting, unburned by failure or fraud. They drink that hard truth with their morning coffee and pass it down like inheritance. But Ellinor does not believe them. Not quite. Not yet.

Because in her pocket, she carries a scrap of cloth. Blue, frayed, stitched with a child’s crooked attempt at a sunrise. Her brother made it before the fever took him. Said it would keep her warm when the sky forgets.

And on days like this, when the sky is steel and the ground is bone, she fingers it like prayer beads and walks into the cold not to forget but to remember.

That morning, a bird sings.

Only one.

A small brown thing, skittish and unsteady, with a cry like something broken being mended. And it is enough. Just enough to pull her breath like a string through the tight place in her chest, to lift her eyes toward the pale horizon. To say without saying:

Not all is lost.
Not yet.
Not ever.

In Emily Dickinson’s quiet insistence, Hope is “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul— / And sings the tune without the words— / And never stops—at all.” But Ellinor knows it is also the thing that burrows. The thing that waits. It is the ember lying still beneath the ash. The breath beneath the stone.

It is not loud. It does not shout.

It waits. It watches.
And one day, it blooms.

“Rise, old song, through hollow air,
Break the chains of dust and gloom,
Call back Hope from its despair,
Let it rise and let it bloom.”
—Chris White, The Virtue of Hope