Growing up in a government facility tends to warp any goodness we were born with, especially when my first memory of this place is standing on the front steps watching my mother drive away with my sister and brother waving from the backseat. That family gave me the name Alexis Renee Andrews seventeen years ago today, a name I haven’t gotten around to changing just yet. The first few years of my life had been happy times, full of love and laughter, then the night before I turned six everything went pear shaped. That’s the night I first realized the people in my dreams were real and they could really hurt me. My mother had always told me that nothing from the dream world could hurt me, boy was she wrong. I watched the dark one throw my father across my bedroom, the way he hit the wall had killed him. Not only did the dream people take away my father that night, but they took my mother from me too. She kept me around for another year, but she barely even looked at me. She never used my name, and I didn’t see her smile again until she was driving away from this place with my siblings still in the car. I know she blamed me for what happened, but what did I know? I was a kid; I had no control over the dreams much less what they did once they became real. I try not to think of my family too much, it’s not exactly an easy subject to dredge up, but I do think of my father. He was trying to save me, the dream people were hurting me and he wanted it to stop. He failed, it cost him his life and they’ve continued to hurt me ever since. The sisters here were caught off guard the first time an injury suddenly appeared. They were certain I was harming myself, so certain that they sent me to a hospital for a few days to see if I was crazy. That’s how I found out about my mother, about her suicide attempt and subsequent committal. I assured them that I was nothing like her, that I was strong of mind and had no intention of hurting myself. I’d probably still be in that hospital had one of the doctors not been checking on me in the middle of the night when the next injuries occurred. As if the dream people were showing off, they made my wounds like that of the Savior, the stigmata they called them, the wounds of the lamb. I called them bullshit. Nail holes through my wrists and ankles, tiny cuts like those a crown of thorns would produce all around my head, scourge marks ripped all over the flesh of my back, and a deep gash in my side to top it all off. The sisters were called in immediately; the doctor told them everything he’d witnessed; how I was locked in the room alone, with no sharp instruments and with my hands lashed to the bedrails. There was no way my wounds could have been self inflicted, even if the doctor hadn’t seen them miraculously split and bleed while he watched. While I cried out in pain and strained to see through the blood filling my eyes, the sisters gathered around my bed and praised their savior for these blessings. Blessings? Were they serious? Unfortunately they were. They saw the stigmata as a sign from the Almighty that I was marked for a purpose. Little did they, or I, know that it was just the dark side playing with their faith.
When we returned to the orphanage, the sisters told all of the other kids what had happened and that I was special. Of course this just made me a bright flashing target for the other children to beat. No one was special in a place like this; if we were special we would still have real homes and real families. The older kids loved to beat that lesson into me every change they got. When the sisters would ask what happened I always told them it was more of the same, the mysterious injuries and not the wrath of discarded children. The occupants of the orphanage grew accustomed to my sudden and inexplicable wounds after a few years, by then I was only freakish to the newer arrivals, and I was now considered one of the older kids, one of the unadoptable. Once you reached the age of ten here, you pretty much knew you’d only leave when they kick you out at seventeen. Seven years went by in a flash, but I was ready for today, I knew what to expect and I had prepared myself for this. Each time a child turned seventeen, the sisters would pool what money they had and give it to the child as they said their goodbyes, then they were let out into the world to thrive or die, it didn’t matter which path you took as long as you did it somewhere other than the orphanage. In the past few years I had picked up odd jobs wherever I could, I knew the sisters would never scrape enough money for me to live even a week on, there were four other kids being released just months ahead of me. As of this morning, when the doors were opened and I was cast out, I had amassed enough money to start a low rent life for myself. Money wasn’t all I had gathered during my preparation. Since I knew I would be forced to live in some less than desirable part of whatever town I ended up in, I knew I would need protection. One of the older boys, Jeshu, had been running errands for a local crime outfit. Part of his payment was a pistol the guys could part with. They had upgraded and gave him their cast off. I’d heard the rumor about Jeshu hiding the gun beneath his mattress, and I knew that his birthday fell just shy of a month after mine. This morning, before the sun had begun to light the sky, I snuck to Jeshu’s bed and relieved him of his most prized possession. He could probably get another one from the guys he worked for, those types had guns laying around everywhere. He could probably even buy a replacement with the money he’d earned running. I wasn’t worried about how Jeshu would cope with the loss of his gun, all I cared about was that the cold steel was safe and secure against the flesh of my lower back. I was heading out into a nasty world, but I wasn’t walking blind. I would be ready for whatever came my way. Too bad bullets don’t hurt dream people.
1143 words, Hakaisha
Home 
Log in 
