| D3 | MARIE | FIN

The sky mocks me as I sit on the ground, the grass poking at my fingers as I run my spindly hands over the green mess of spikes. The clouds that pass through the mixes of blues and pinks only makes me want to scale the fence even more than I already desire to. I could do it, I could stand and set my foot upon that barbed wire, slowly and painfully make my way up to the top with steady footing and streams of blood as the wire would cut at my legs. It would be worth it though, to escape the community home, this prison that I’m forced to endure every day of my life. The more I think about it, the more the sharp-edged wire taunts me from the few feet away that it stands, oh how I want to run right into it and simply die a death like a foolish girl. Because that would be so much more promising than my future in district three, especially as a worthless orphan. After all, I’ve never had any family.

I can’t honestly say I remember the day that I was placed upon the doorstep, just a small mass of flesh that was probably screaming and crying with the ferocity of a lion. The stories they tell me are horrific though, the way that it was raining and how I sat out in the cold all night, just hardly a human by the morning if anything at all. And still through it all I continued to cry.

Even to this day, as I sit outside of that big brick building, I can still see my pinched up face and light green-blue eyes filled with tears as a scraggly lady may have picked me up and carried me inside, whispering words of comfort as though they would help to ease my little soul. If they did help, which they obviously haven’t, maybe I wouldn’t be so bitter, maybe I would believe in a future outside of this place with the barred windows and mushy food that doesn’t taste like anything at all. Any child was better off than to be at the community home, a place where you knew that no one loved you, they simply were forced to take care of you because you were the outcasts of society, your parents didn’t love you so why should they?

Here I am today, just a lonely little misfit among all of the other frowning children who try so hard to smile at the littlest things, none of us can anymore, and they’ve taken the laughter from our souls. You don’t hear giggling, you hear screaming. You don’t hear laughing, you hear crying. It’s a dreadful place, this orphanage which I’ve grown up in. Thank the gods that I’m used to it though, or else, I’d just be like one of those kids, one of the ones like little Katie.

She came in one day, her blonde hair protruding sharply from her head and bruises staining her pale arms up and down. There was no grin on her face, no smirk that was even minorly evident as the adult next to her exchanged silent words with the tall lady behind the desk. With a brief moment of understanding, the girl’s expression grew even darker as she began to hug the leg of the adult next to her, frightened. Whispered words from the lady behind the wooden table and the little girl was quickly exchanged, a simple trade of a life, a beating heart that can’t be fixed.

“What’s your name?” I remember walking up to her, at the time I would’ve been about eight, a small girl with hope that one day my own mother would come back to get me. While many others at this time were desolate and dull, I was awake with hope, my eyes glimmering in the faint sunlight that filtered through the dusty curtains.

“Katie,” Her voice was small, that’s all I remember about that encounter, the way that she spoke as she tried desperately to cover her arms as to not show off the marks that resided upon them. “Where am I?”

“The Community Home,” I answered her, spreading my arms widely as a grin shone across my face. “You’re part of my family now, Katie.” I tried her name on my tongue, it was short and delicate, much like her tangled blonde hair that stuck from her head. Her hands were trembling as I took them in my own, willing her to stop being so scared, telling her that everything would be okay. I didn’t know the extent of why she was given up, why that lady just brought her in and dropped her off with all of us lost children.

I would know a few years later though.

Katie and I quickly became the best of friends, well at least as close as a person can get with another person at an orphanage, and I thought that it would last forever. I was naïve, stupid, foolish. You see, when I saw her dangling body from those rafters at the age of thirteen I couldn’t help but to scream, to plead to the merciless gods above that it was all a mistake, that it was all a dream.

Ever since then I’ve just given up, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no happiness in a place of death, haunted by the souls of those long past. Especially little Katie, the girl who I will miss forever, and one day, I’ll find that son-of-a-bitch who hurt her and kick her ass. Because Katie didn’t deserve to die, she didn’t need to go, she could’ve had a life of her own.

And yet, she didn’t. And either will I.


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faceclaim - katerina plotnikova
word - 965