How She Reigns

Backstory part one

In a room where both her parents were sticking needles into the arms, a five-year-old curly headed red-haired girl with hazel eyes stood barefoot on a milk crate. The plastic doing nothing to her callused bare feet as she stood there boiling macaroni noodles on the stove for her dinner. She had her spoon circling the boiling noodles on the stove, actively tuning out the background.

There, on the floor now, lay her parents, immobile from the drug high on the floor of the other rooms.

The young girl, Stevie, was unsure how she had managed to survive and even at the age of five was more that aware of the dangers of life. Her harsh environment caused her to age mentally at a rate like no other, her wisdom and sense of awareness that of a person tenfold her age.

Alone at the table she sat alone eating her macaroni and reading her one book, "The tale of Mouse men", that she stole from the neighbors kids a couple month ago.

She wasn't an angel herself; she knew stealing was bad, but she just didn't care in some cases.

Thanks to stealing books, and the closed captioning stuck on her television, she taught herself to read and write, tie her shoes, and even had a deep understanding of manipulation tactics and emotional suppression that many psychologists dreamed to understand.

They way she spoke was a professional manner, better suited for a teenager, and even at 5 was more than capable at mathematics.

So when a foreign man came into her home unannounced on that evening without knocking she sensed trouble. When her parents only nodded to the man and returned to their drug use the peach fuzz growing on her arms stood on their ends.

She watched him, like a hawk while continuing to eat from her perch on the counter. She was baffled as he handed a large briefcase to her parents who were standing now- wobbly on their drugged feet, their balance thrown off from IV drugs. She realized quickly that the man was purchasing, well, her.

An emotional numbness drifted within her, in a way, kidnapping wasn't even scary to her anymore. Having faced it many times, escaping each time. But being sold was a new feeing of fear. She placed her bowl of macaroni on the counter, gripping her book as her feet carried her across the floor of the kitchen, her eyes on her mother.

A sole tear escape as she tried desperately walked to her mother, trying to grab her mother's hand, hoping just once her mother would show her the slightest of love to hold her.

But that was not the case.

As her one hand gripped her book her mother side stepped her reach, and pushed her small body out the door to where the man was walking away, his back to her. She turned and was saddened as her parents called her Steven on the way out, mispronouncing her name at their last goodbye.

Any hopes of having a real family left her.

"Good riddance." She heard her mother bark as the door shut in her face, throwing her shoes out the door. She closed her eyes in sadness, every daughter wants a mother to love her. She so desperately wanted to be loved by her parents, her mother especially. But she held her book and closed her eyes as the man threw her shoes at her and all but drug her limp body to the car.

Holding in her tears, she looked up to the man, a strong jawed, rugged looking man. He smelt of cigarettes and something sour. He loaded her into the backseat of his car and spoke in a language she could not understand. What she could understand, after hearing similar words repeated is that she was not coming back.

The situation she had found herself in sounded bad to her. She was being sold to a man from another country, someone who had no respect for her, and she could almost smell the death on him. The man unloaded her from the car and pushed her resistant body into a metal cage where she was still able to hold her book in her death grip. A blanket was placed over the cage and she was in the dark, literally blinded from her surroundings.