Tevun-Krus #6 - Superhuman

Death Sentence

Death Sentence
By: Sarah Corner (AKA TrilliumAngel/Angel)

I was only just born when they knew something was wrong. The moment I entered this world, it felt like misery followed me everywhere, even if I never actually witnessed it. The pain was always there, and I could only cope with it. Annette Wilson was the first woman in my life, and up until I turned eighteen, she was like a mother to me. Sometimes even more so than my actual mother.

The complications with bringing me into the world cast my father away, and it was almost as if Mother had too. She was a silent ghost on the edges of a room, and I was sure her quiet demeanor rubbed off on me as soon as I was deemed safe to return home.

I remembered my childhood better than anyone else could have. The details of the hospital were still fresh in my mind, even after Annette suggested we move somewhere less populated where she'd transfer me to a different hospital. I went there more often than not, not just because Annette helped me, but because I didn't have much of a choice. She knew how much I hated being in centers like those.

Death lingered in the air there, and it made my stomach impossibly uneasy.

But Annette refused to come to my house. She was a lovely woman; she stood on long skinny legs and had warm nimble fingers she'd use to hold mine while walking down the vacant hallways of her center. Her hair was round with brunette curls that curved beneath her chin, and as a child I would tug on them not realizing that it hurt people to do so.

Annette's center always used to make me feel alone, because I didn't realize that there were other people like me. I was confused as to why my brother never came with me. Surely he was like me, right?

Wrong.

Kayden was born a few moments after me, but he never cried quite as much as I did when I entered the world. In fact, he never cried at all. The doctors were fearful that there was something wrong, but with me bawling my eyes out in that hospital wing, unable to figure out why I was feeling so sick to my stomach and ill from the sting of dwindling lives in the pit of my very being, I was viewed as the obvious problem. Kayden lived out his months as an infant in the arms of my mother.

When Annette viewed my "minor discomforts" as completely harmless, I was returned to my mother and Kayden three months after our birth. By that point our father had packed up and uprooted his life with Mother. Not that I ever understood anything about that, but it was one of my first questions once I was able to talk. Mother told me that I didn't need a father.

Mother was fine for a while, at least until I was old enough to stand on a stood to use the stove, or to clean the dishes, or to do laundry occasionally. It would have been fine had she had a hobby, but Mother alienated herself from the outside world, living off the money from her father who loved our family dearly. Grandad made visits to our house in the suburbs as much as he could, and I knew with intense certainty that Kayden loved Grandad. Even as he grew, Kayden would seat himself on Grandad's knee in the living room where Mother would be. Those were the few times she made an effort to make herself presentable.

He often suggested Mother move back home with him, and take Kayden and I with him. We'd never visited his home, and Mother was adamant that we wouldn't. She grew weaker, still, and refused Grandad's help. He loved his daughter, and it struck me as odd that I never saw Mother show that kind of parental affection with Kayden and I.

When Grandad came, I slowly became aware of the absence I felt when in the kitchen, in my room, in the basement. I was constantly haunted by people I didn't know, by people I didn't care about, but they'd become background music to the dull, dreary orchestra of my life. The song that I missed so dearly during Grandad's visits was the one that followed Kayden.