On the 1st of October, 1989, a miracle occurred in the Cafferty family. The day had started off normal enough. Mr. Cafferty woke early, pulled on his muck boots, and stepped into the chilly fog to feed their animals. Mrs. Cafferty brewed a strong pot of coffee and began cooking breakfast. Their only daughter, Anna, helped her mother set the table and do the dishes after their meal.
Anna was a young thing. Nineteen as of recently, out of school, but with no plan. As her parents grew older, it became increasingly clear that she would most likely have to take over the farm soon. But for the time being, Anna would be happy to help out with the more difficult tasks. Her mother sent her into town for groceries around noon with a list as long as her forearm.
She wrapped herself in her coat tightly as she walked down the narrow roads of their town. It was a little early to be getting a cold front, but mother nature made her own rules. Anna's bright hair stood out in the dreary mist, red against the dull grays of the buildings surrounding her. It was a fairly long walk to the grocers, but the warmth of the market was worth the wait.
Taking her time to collect each of the items written on the list, Anna began to feel a tightness in her chest. At first, it could easily be waved off as heartburn. She did recall hearing a family friend telling her about how bacon could cause it, which she had eaten for breakfast. The longer she walked the aisles though, the more the burning sensation increased. Not much time after she checked out with her things, her abdomen began to feel heavy and bloated.
As she struggled to balance her bags in her arms, there was a stabbing pain in the middle of her spine. Anna dropped the paper packages, cans of food rolling onto the sidewalk outside of the grocers. Her sensible kitten heels betrayed her then, forcing her to balance on the side of her ankle when another wave of pain washed over her. She gasped when liquid began to run down her leg, wetting her spandex.
Anna's water had broke.
The girl collapsed to the damp cement, just barely catching her head before it hit the ground. The pain was all throughout her body now, worse at her back and abdomen.
An older woman spotted her on the ground and stepped over the cans as quickly as she could to get to Anna. "Oh, dear!" The elderly woman cried, hands placed gently on the girl's narrow shoulders. "Are you alright?"
She couldn't respond with anything other than a pained shriek. Her woolen coat had fallen away from her stomach, revealing a shocking sight. Her lower half had swelled up like a football with too much air, resembling a pregnant stomach.
Only Anna wasn't pregnant, or hadn't been when the day had started.
The birth went surprisingly swift. Anna's screams had attracted a crowd of people from nearby shops, but there wasn't enough time to move her. Two men sacrificed their coats to help with the cause and somebody from a nearby barber shop lent some clean hand towels to dab the sweat from the poor girl's forehead and neck. In a final scream of agony, Anna gave birth assisted by the elderly woman, right there in the middle of the sidewalk.
The infant was immediately wrapped in a shawl, it's little face as cute as it could be as a newborn (and if you have ever seen a newborn, you would be lying to say that they are actually cute). "It's a lass!" The woman announced to the crowd, who cheered.
The only problem was that the baby had yet to wail (which, again, if you have ever seen a newborn, you would know how loud they are in their first breaths). This brought a deep scowl to the woman's wrinkled face. She pulled the baby's foot out from the bundle and flicked at the sole of her foot. The infant flinched and wriggled away from the contact, scrunched up hands reaching for its own smushed face.
She was alive, alive and well, thank the Lord. The baby was placed atop Anna's still heaving chest.
As one can imagine, that trip to the hospital was awkward. Anna simply hadn't been pregnant. She would have known, would have felt it, but she hadn't and that was what the young girl couldn't get over. There had to be something wrong with that baby. That thing had been generated out of nothing but air. Anna never kissed anybody before, let alone put herself in a situation where she could have gotten pregnant.
Of course, nobody would ever believe that, especially her parents.
So, the decision was easy. The baby would be immediately given up. Whether they could find a forever family for it, or a temporary one, it wasn't Anna's problem anymore.
And thus Charlotte Cafferty had come into the world.
The child was placed into the foster care system in a heartbeat. Being an infant and all, it wasn't hard to find her temporary homes for the first few years. People grew increasingly concerned the older she got; Charlotte didn't speak until the age of five and even then, her words were so quiet that she could barely be understood. Of course, when couples were looking to foster, this was often the deal breaker. The child's odd tendencies resembled the early symptoms of many disabilities or possible disorders and in the nineties, very few people were willing to take care of a disabled child when there were plenty of 'normal' ones to choose from.
As far as any doctor could tell, she was just shy. There were no intellectual disabilities to speak of. She was simply a quiet child. Perhaps her nonchalance was a little unsettling to see on someone so young, but she just didn't want to talk.
In all honesty, the best way to describe the little girl's attitude towards the world was 'apathetic'. She watched everything through her big brown eyes with a sort of disinterest in it all.
Nearing her eleventh year on earth, Charlotte had been living with a large family, full of other foster children. The parents, Mr. and Mrs. Calhan were tight with money and had tried solving the problem by fostering more and more kids for the check the government sent them for taking care of each child. 'Taking care of' was a very loose term in this situation, though. They spent most of their time out of the house, leaving everyone to fend for themselves after school.
On this particular day, the six children were left to their own devices. Charlotte sat at the dining room table, her homework splayed out in front of her. Behind her chair stood Jasmine, her foster sister, who was the closest in age to her, messily running her hands through her coppery hair. The moment Charlotte had been added to the household, Jasmine had attached herself to the girl's hip. She quickly decided that they would be best friends, even if Charlotte barely spoke.
Jasmine was perfectly fine with their one-sided conversations, though. She began chattering endlessly as she started to braid her friend's hair. Charlotte listened only partly to the other girl, most of her attention was fixed on her math work book rather than the ten year old's complaints.
One of the older boys, Oliver, walked in with a steaming bowl of mac n' cheese. He pushed all of Jasmine's comic books out of the way of his seat. "Hey!" She paused her story and abandoned her braiding to gather the stack carefully. "I paid good money for these!"
Oliver snorted at the very grown up sounding comment. "You stole those."
"So?" The brunette held the books to her chest protectively. "Somebody still paid for them."
Watching this interaction absently, Charlotte blinked. There was a metallic smell to the air. At the time, she had assumed that it was the new cologne that Oliver had been covering himself in as of late. That stuff smelt gross.
The older kid looked over her shoulder. "Number four is wrong," he stated, pointing at her work book. Charlotte glanced down at her work. No it wasn't; she had triple checked. She chose to ignore that along with the smell. Oliver shrugged his shoulders when she didn't answer and went back to his food. She normally didn't respond.
The house was always more lively when the Calhans were out. When they were home, every child in the house was too scared to do much more than leave their room. The drug addicts that fostered them always seemed to be looking for something to be angry about. Either they were yelling at one another, the state of the house, or one of the children. Each of them had learned this the hard way.
But when they were out, which they were much more in the last few weeks, the kids took advantage of the opportunity to do whatever they wanted. Charlotte and Jasmine would do their homework and read comics in various rooms of the house, but the other siblings would keep to themselves and go about their days until the parents came home.
Once Oliver had finished his food, he retreated to the living room, leaving the two girls to their own devices.
"And then," Jasmine was saying, drawing out her words for suspense. "Allison rumored both of that guards to shoot each other ! Isn't that cool?" She didn't wait for a response she knew she wouldn't get. "I wish I could make people do whatever I want. If I could, I'd make Sean stop teasing me." She tied off the finished braid with a hair tie. "All done."
Charlotte felt at the messy plait and pulled it over her shoulder. "Thank you," she whispered.
There was shouting from the other side of the house.
The girls perked up at the noise, ready to bolt to their room if it was the Calhans. It wasn't. The voices sounded like they belonged to their other foster siblings. There was a pause, and then the sound of footsteps barreling down the halls.
Whoever it was stopped in the kitchen. Jasmine poked her head through the door connecting the dinning room to the kitchen.
"Where is that damn smell coming from?!" Someone was shouting.
Like all important moments in one's life, time seemed to slow around them. Charlotte's eyes swiped over her homework, then Jasmine's comic books, and then the hallway. An orange glow briefly painted the walls, the source coming from one of the back bedrooms.
The smell was stronger now, so pungent that it felt like it was burning her nostrils.
Eye's widening, Charlotte watched as the glow grew brighter. It moved from the bedroom into the hallway itself. It was a bloom of fire.
It roared through the hallway, engulfing the very air and rushing towards the dinning room.
In a panic, Charlotte struggled out of her chair, tripping on the way up. She opened her mouth to warn Jasmine, who was unknowingly standing in the kitchen now, but it was too late. The flames washed into the entrance of the dining room, bright and terrifying.
A scream ripped from her throat. It was the first that had ever done so. It rang throughout the house, shrill and horrified.
The dining room went up in flames.
The kitchen erupted in an explosion that sent everything and everyone flying.
The heat was unbearable. It reminded her of the feeling of sitting too close to a fireplace or a pit and feeling like your face was going to burn off, but there was nowhere to escape it. The fire had left the air, but caught onto all the paper on the table and the fabric of the chair cushions.
Charlotte had fallen to the floor, still screaming at the pain brought on by the heat. The explosion had blown the door to the kitchen off its hinges, it lay, in flames, next to her. There were more screams in the house, but those weren't hers.
She was one of the lucky ones. Her hair hadn't caught yet and neither had her clothes, but the initial blast had left her skin red and burning.
There wasn't a single thought running through her head as she ran to escape the house. Just adrenaline powering her petite body. She had no idea what had happened to the others, but she just needed out.
The living room lay in front of her. Front door just a few yards away. Charlotte dashed for it, ignoring the flames working away at the couches. Out. The door was right there, a chance to get out of the blistering heat.
Her skirt was burning. Either it had caught on something else on the way out, or it had been burning the whole time, but now it was in flames, eating away at her skin. Charlotte broke into a sprint, relief flooding her being when her fingertips reached the knob. It sizzled and cooked the skin of her hand in the second it took to open the door, but the cool rush of air that greeted her was worth it.
She immediately threw herself into the grass outside and began rolling frantically to extinguish the flames eating away at her skirt. The fire went out, but the searing heat stayed, almost too much to handle.
Charlotte lay out on the front lawn, the grass cool beneath her, the darkened sky vast and full of gray clouds hovering overhead. Rain, she thought. Please rain.
Blaring sirens drowned out the roaring fire that was embracing the house. She was saved, the other kids would be saved. Someone could help her.
But they didn't.
When the fire trucks stopped outside of the house and Charlotte got up to talk to one of the firemen, anybody really, they ran straight past her. Not a single eye landed on her. The world felt cold around her despite the fire and her burns.
The ambulances stopped beside the other vehicles. Not one EMT saw her. She was shivering violently. She shouldn't have been that cold.
"Hey!" She dared to shout, waving her arms as she approached the trucks. "Over here!" Charlotte was standing right in front of the ambulance now, but no one saw her. The workers swiveled their heads as if they had heard her, but no one could see her.
If you asked anyone who had been at the scene that night, they would all tell you the same thing: They hadn't seen Charlotte.
She wasn't spotted on the lawn. Nobody saw her being taken out of the house. Not a soul had seen her near the ambulances.
Charlotte had disappeared from view.
Her blood felt icy. The world went on. Everyone was frantically trying to put out the fire. People ran into the house and came out with limp bodies.
Exhaustion quickly set in and the pain subsided to a dull burn. Charlotte climbed into the back of one of the empty ambulances and sat on the bench text to the gurney. She curled in on herself, a deep ache in her chest. She was alone, truly alone.
Nobody saw her until the EMTs had driven half way back to the hospital. They hadn't picked anybody up, lucky for Charlotte. But the medical worker who sat in the back shrieked when he spotted the small girl napping on the bench across from him.
Surely, she hadn't been there a moment before, but there she was now, disheveled and sleeping soundly.
It wasn't long after the fire that Charlotte was placed in a different home. Her social worker had given the young girl a few weeks to recover from her injuries and collect herself before putting her with a different family, but not long enough.
The years dragged on and the anomaly that had occurred that fateful night only picked up from there. On occasion, mostly in times of stress, Charlotte would simply disappear. She would be gone for hours at a time, but whenever she was spotted next, she would always insist that she was right there. She never left, but everybody claimed that she had gone missing.
The loneliness never left. It was a whole different level of isolation. She could be standing in a room, staring someone right in the face and they wouldn't even look at her.
By fifteen, she had become accustomed to being alone. Charlotte even took solace in it.
Which is why, when her then current foster dad would open the door to her without warning, or go through her drawers and messages, it irked her so much. He left her with no privacy. After years of being ignored, he wouldn't leave her alone and she couldn't handle it.
Three months in and she could no longer take it. The foster care system was absolute hell. Of course, not all homes were bad, but Charlotte didn't think she could take another three years of being passed around with different families. She could take care of herself. She always had.
So she packed a bag.
She couldn't go to her case worker; things would only go back to the way they were, or she'd get stuck with someone worse. It was obvious that she could handle herself, though. Everyone saw that. Charlotte could be alone, do things for herself, always could. So, she packed a bag, took the money she had been saving up from pocket change for months, and crept through the nearest window.
First, she got a bus to the next town over. Then she stopped at a McDonald's before settling on walking the streets aimlessly. It was dark, and undoubtedly dangerous, but it was better than being trapped. Maybe being alone in a city full of people would be better than being alone in a house full of people.
There wasn't really anywhere to sleep other than the sidewalk, but that was out of the question for obvious reasons. This city was much more busy, even at night, than in the one she had been in previously. The streets stayed fairly full despite it being three in the morning.
Just when Charlotte was considering going back to the McDonalds to take a nap in a booth, a hand was placed on her shoulder.
"Lost, Sweet Pea?"
Charlotte spun around, greeted with a mouthful of yellowed teeth and the scruffy face of a clearly drunk man. As always, she kept her mouth shut and looked on in unfiltered fear.
"Maybe," the man sneered, breath hot and way too close to her face. "You're deaf. I asked, 'Are you lost?'"
Eyes wide, Charlotte did her best to make it look like she wasn't startled. "No." She spoke as clearly and sternly as she could manage.
The man didn't look convinced, but the girl being lost wasn't his concern. "I'm not so sure." He crept closer. "How 'bout you come with me? I was just about to get a drink." It smelt like he had already gotten at least one split on him.
"No thank you." She turned on her heel in the opposite direction, ready to run, but his hand clamped down on her forearm, pulling her back to him. Charlotte squeaked. "Let go!"
She was promptly pulled into the man's chest. "I don't think so," he breathed into her ear. His stale breath filled her nostrils. Her hair tickled his cheek. The grip he had on her was so tight she felt like she could suffocate.
Somebody in a dark coat passed, but refused to look their way. Charlotte watched as they disappeared around a corner. What wonderful help. She was on the verge of tears. In a city she didn't know, shielded by the dark, held by a stranger with no intention of letting her go, Charlotte felt so overwhelmed she could throw up the fries she had eaten not long before.
But the fear, raw and cold, grabbed hold of her. She knew what men like that did. Knew that she'd be lucky to get out of this unscathed. An icy chill ran through her at the thought and the man instantly let out a confused shout and loosened his grip.
"What the fuck?!" He was looking right at her, but his eyes hadn't focused on her. She was right there, but he couldn't see her.
It was happening again. Charlotte had disappeared from sight, but she was still there. She could feel the chilly wind against her neck and the warmth from the man's hands quickly leaving. This was probably one of the most convenient times for this to happen. The first thing she should have done was bolt in the other direction, but now she was angry. Angry at this disgusting man. Angry at the man she had run away from just hours before. Angry at the world for refusing to acknowledge her pain and her fear. Adrenaline shot through her veins and before she thought about it longer, she slammed her raised fist into the man's jaw.
His head swung back on impact and his body crumbled unto the sidewalk.
She was there. The throb in her hand told her that much. She existed. Only she didn't know if she wanted to anymore.