2/3

--Marielle Stevens--

There was a time when I was alone. I knew that I was alone, that there was nobody around who could ease this emptiness. Because, to me, that’s how loneliness presented itself. As emptiness.

Being the only girl around, I had nobody to look up to, nobody to trust. The women were locked inside their houses all day, never bothering with me. My own mother had been taken away during the war, as many children’s parents were. My father had never come back.

All of the children around me had lost something. They had lost someone. Someone who was precious to them, who was the center of their whole world.

That wasn’t how it had been for me. My mother was the only woman in my life, yes, but we were not close. Not at all. She preferred to go to the bar, play the piano and sing and come home smelling of thick perfume and cologne and smells that I did not recognize. She would walk into our small home, staggering and weaving back and forth as she walked, before she would collapse on the small sofa that we owned and demand of me, in the sweet voice that I had come to know, “Marielle, darling… bring Mother a glass of water, will you?”

Most would think it was sweet, to have a daughter bring her mother a glass of water when she was barely conscious, on the couch. I did not. I knew that mother had been drinking, she had been with other people. She had been with people other than my father, my dear father who was always working and always fighting for our family.

She had dishonored her promises that she had made to him when they had been married, four years before my conception. Father didn’t know, and mother didn’t care. She barely remembered that I was there, most of the time.

“Marielle, darling, would you fetch me the--”

She only remembered my name so she could call it and use me as her slave. Her darling, her precious little girl, that would run errands for her without a single complaint, and look up to her each day and ask, “Mother, will you teach me how to cook?” or something similar.

Each day, mother would look down at me, head pounding from a hang over that she ought not have gotten, and say, “Why must you burden me with this task right now, darling? I feel sick; oh, be a dear and bring me a glass of water?” and I would not learn then, either.

When mother was taken, just after or just before the war ended, I cannot remember when, I do not remember feeling sad. I remember being regretful, yes. For now who was going to raise me into the woman I was expected to be? For, in this land, I was expected to raise children and to cook and to clean and be a perfect lady.

All that mother had taught me was how to be somebody who was ugly in the world of women. She had shown me how to leave my only child behind and dishonor any vows I may have made. My mother had left me alone in this world, and now they expected me to survive.

I was sure that, when father came home, everything would change. It would all get better, I had thought, because father would straighten everything out, make it all go back to normal. But father never came home, and I was alone in the large house.

When I had left behind the large house and tried to move on with my life, behave like the other children, I found that I could not. There was something missing, something that I had not noticed missing before, and it was something that only I could find.

A boy mentioned something about a dinosaur when I passed him. It’s name was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. For some reason, that made my eyes widen and my heartbeat quicken, and I stopped momentarily. I decided that, if nothing more was said, I should consult the village elder, and tell her what I thought.

The boy continued to name off dinosaurs, and when I was certain that it was not going to come to light once more, I left the driveway and headed to the center of the small village.

The old woman would listen to me, surely. I would tell her of my dreams, of a boy with two colored hair and hazel eyes, calling my name and saying, “I need you, too!” I would tell her about the reaction I had to the boys talking of the dinosaurs, about my body’s reaction to anything and everything. I would tell her, especially of the sensation of being empty, of needing some other person to fill the void in me.

I was twelve years old when I told the elder this. I was fifteen when I ran away, searching for the boy named Rex Harrington.