Bran Wolfe// D8

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I’ve always been tiny for my age and I’m not quite sure I’m going to get any taller. They say I can still grow, but I’m not so sure. I used to get dirt underneath my fingernails from climbing so much and they were my tokens, but now, I bite off my fingernails, leaving them uneven and ragged, only blood underneath them.

The skin that covers my body in unbelievably pale. It’s fitting for the winter, my favorite season, but not so much for summer and Rajas, my older brother, teases me and calls me a lobster. The skin over my face is soft on contrary to my rough, callused hands and feet. Mostly my hands. The calluses on my feet have faded over time. My lips are thin and a dark pink and I never let them open up and betray my crooked teeth to the world. I have three teeth growing in over other teeth and Aria teases me about those. I have an odd sort of nose. It has no slope to it and comes straight down across my face, complete with flaring nostrils I can’t control when I’m annoyed about something.

Overwhelmed by thick brown eyebrows, a brown slightly darker than my already dark hair, my eyes have never been a particularly noticeable feature of my face. Round with circles underneath them, they are quickly overlooked for my hair which everyone says is “too long.” It’s nearly to my shoulders and straight as a pin and I like it because I can brush it myself. Something I can do myself.

The muscles of my legs faded, but my arms have added muscles. With arms that used to be good at climbing, but are now for dragging me about and wheeling my wheelchair.

Why?

Because I’m paralyzed from the waist down.

Under the Fur

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Mother always said I was the most stubborn. If I wanted to do something, even if it were forbidden, I'd do it anyway. Like climbing. She always said I would fall, that I would get hurt, but I did it anyway. Big mistake. I'm quick, that made me good at climbing, I'm quick and agile, but not quick enough and more stubborn than I could control.

Confinement to a wheelchair hasn't stifled my imagination and curiosity completely though. I used to imagine myself climbing a long, green vine up to the giant, or scaling the maiden's hair to her tower, just like the stories Mother told me. Now, I'm wheeling to her rescue. Not quite the journey I always imagined, but my brothers say I can still be brave from my wheelchair. I like to think I'm brave. Mother says I've been so brave about my injury. She says I take the injury so well. Except, she doesn't see me when I'm alone.

When I first found out that I'd never be able to walk again, I tore up all my clothing with my hands and teeth. Mother didn't say much about that. She understood. Except, this happens every week. There will be times when I lose it, when I look down at my lifeless legs and anger pits in my stomach, clenching my teeth, making my hands tighten and my eyes fill with hot tears until my fists are beating my legs, the walls, clawing fingers on my bedspread, on my clothes, on my face until someone runs in to quiet me.

I hate being babied. I'm willing to snap at anyone who babies me. I'm perfectly capable of doing things myself and nothing gives me greater joy than being able. Mother says I'm smart and my brothers agree. What I lack in strength, I now, more than ever, try to make up in brains. I'll study for hours until every single fact about everything in my books are memorized. I'll even read my older brother's and sisters' books. I used to be afraid that Father wouid turn away from me now that his son couldn't walk, couldn't get strong, but he was impressed by my smarts. Before he died, of course.

Since his death, what my older brother calls "my fits," my bursts of anger, have only increased in number. Because it's bad enough being a cripple, but it's even worse when you don't have a father.

The Sheep

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~Before the fall

I loved to climb. I would climb barefoot. I would climb every day. I'd climb up our house, fitting my hands and feet into the breaks in the stones, wrapping my fingers around vines. Mother never liked it, but Father would smile and say I was strong. It gave me so much pride to hear that. Mother would scoff and warn me not to climb again, but I did.

My brothers and sisters didn't care as much as Mother. Aria's wild enough herself and Rajas would just warn me to be careful. Sarta would roll her eyes. I didn't care. I used to get hauled into the principal's office for climbing the school building and still I climbed. One time, a boy in my grade stole my pin, the pretty one Mother had put on my clothing and threw it on the roof of the bakery. I climbed it and got it back, imagining I was climbing up to the damsel in distress, a beautiful princess who would reward me with a kiss on either cheek.

That was what I was thinking when I climbed the Justice Building.

~The fall

The day was bitingly cold and the wind whipped around my hair and nipped at my pink cheeks as my ten year old self climbed the ivy that had wound itself around the aged building. My hands were stiff with the cold, so I blew warm breath onto them. I was barefoot as usual. I was used to the cold and it didn't bother me.

I don't remember exactly how high up I was or what they were saying exactly. It sounded threatening though. That much I remember. My curiosity got the best of me and I crept up towards the window the voices were coming from, completely forgetting my quest. I was to defeat the dragon at the top of the building. Now, I wish more than ever that I'd kept climbing. They saw me after a few moments. The men in the white uniforms and the white helmets. Peacekeepers and the other man, pale-faced, in the chair that he was being threatened from gasped and that's when I knew I was in trouble. I tried to get away, but a white-gloved hand gripped my wrist, holding me on my perch on the windowsill. My stomach lurched terribly.

"He saw." Those were the last words I heard before that white-gloved hand was pushing at my heaving chest and I was flying...

~After the fall

They told me I was in a coma for weeks and Mother just sat by my bed, waiting. She was waiting for me to wake up while everyone else waited for me to die. I don't remember much of being asleep. I know I dreamed, but since waking, the dreams have faded into a mere, lingering feeling of horror. I do remember waking up. My tutor was in the room and when I opened my eyes, he gave a cry of delight and I swear that from the nearby woods, I could hear wolves howl. The older man leaned over me, sweeping my hair, longer since the fall, from my face and he smiled with his limited teeth.

"I want to get up," I told him, my back sore, but then the man frowned and I didn't understand. I made to swing my legs out of bed, but found I couldn't move them. Panic seized at my chest, restricting my breathing, and frantically, I threw the blankets off my legs and just stared at them.

They looked exactly the same, but they didn't feel exactly the same. In fact, they didn't feel like anything at all. I could touch them and only feel soft skin on my hands, not soft hands on my legs. That's when it hit me.

I could never walk again.

I remember throwing up all over my stupid, lifeless legs. I remember screaming as my kind, old tutor held me and Mother ran in and cried out and my siblings shouted, "Bran!"

Trying to help me adjust started immediately. I named the wheelchair Mother got me "Hodor" after the faithful stead of a hero in one of Mother's stories. I insist upon wheeling myself in Hodor and even figured out a way to drag myself down stairs, though Mother doesn't approve.

Now, I get tutored all the time rather than go to school after all the kids called me a cripple. My siblings and Mother are supportive enough and I know if Father were here, as I wish he was every single day, he would be even more so. Rajas believes I’m brave, Sarita says kind things to me, Aria makes me laugh, Ricky is adorable and then there’s Johanne. Mother doesn’t like him, so I wheel away from him.

It’s hard. It’s hard especially without Father. He has an incident too, but it ended him and it took another piece of my heart out of my body. Mother says that we just gotta get through it. It’s taking each and every day like it is. She says we just have to move away from the things that hurt us inside and out.

But, that’s kind of hard when the thing that hurts me the most inside and out is attached to me from the waist down.
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