We’re not like the others. Please, we desperately need some advice.
My first memory was as a toddler, crawling over to the fence of the playpen. Using my small hands, I tried to push over the fence to join the adults at the table. Even at such a young age, I thought it was unfair.
“Oh my, how big you’re getting!” Ms. Devanna reached over the fence to pick me up. I cried into her shoulder as she bounced me up and down. “I know you want to join the rest of the family, but I have something special for you.”
She held out the bottle to me, and I sucked on it. I grabbed the bottle between my chubby hands, tilting it further back to get every single last drop. Even though there was nothing left, I was still hungry.
I continued to cry, reaching towards the table. I didn’t know what they were having, but I wanted it.
Ms. Devanna carried me back into my bedroom, setting me down carefully in my crib.
The next day when I woke up, one of my legs was sticking through the wooden legs of the crib. I cried and yelled out, desperately trying to free my leg.
“What is going on in there?” A gruff voice came through the door. I yelled more, hoping that he would come in to help me. Instead, he slammed his fist against the door. “Keep quiet! Devanna! Get it to shut up!”
I kicked against the wood with my free leg several times, but it was too strong.
The door opened.
It was Ms. Devanna. When she looked at me, concern filled her face. She stepped over to my crib and looked down at me.
“Oh my, you’re stuck! Here, why don’t I help you out of there?” She grabbed my foot with a light touch, twisting it softly before pushing my leg through the hole. It hurt a little, but when I was free, I started to laugh and smile at her.
I stood up on the mattress, jumping up at her for her to pick me up. She struggled to support my weight this time before setting me back down on the floor. She turned to the crib, hands on her hips. “It looks like we’re going to need to get you a bigger bed.”
I sat there, pointing to my mouth. “Hungry.”
She smiled at me and pulled another bottle from her apron. This one was bigger than the one I had yesterday, which made me excited. “Drink up, Nahom. This will help you grow big and strong.”
By the time Ms. Devanna cleaned up the broken pieces of wood from the floor, I could already get to a standing position on my own. As she was taking apart the crib, I started to walk. I stepped to the curtain covering the entrance to my room and pulled it open quietly.
This was the first time I could make it out of the room on my own, and I snuck out of the room without Ms. Devanna noticing.
I went to the left down the hallway, peeking through some of the different rooms. One room looked like another bedroom. There were two sets of bunk beds, with each of them having their own curtains to block the bed from view.
In the corner of the hallway, I saw another curtain hanging from a rod on the ceiling. I pulled the curtain to the side and peeked my head in. There was a boy. He looked a little older than me. Not yet a teenager, but almost.
I watched as he bounced a small red ball against the wall across from his bed. It would hit the wall, bounce on the floor, and return to him. I watched this happen a few times, and without noticing, I leaned too hard on the curtain, causing it to screech against the rod.
The boy turned to me.
“Oh, hey. Who are you? What are you doing in my room?”
“I’m Nahom. What’s your name?”
“Ryuk.”
Before either of us could say anything else, I felt a hand on my back and jumped. It was Ms. Devanna.
“Nahom! Please don’t wander off like that again. Come on, let’s go back to your room. I fixed it for you.”
I waved goodbye to Ryuk before following Ms. Devanna back to my room. To my surprise, she didn’t just fix the crib. She changed the entire room for me. Instead of just the crib in the middle of the room, there was a small bed in the corner, similar to Ryuk’s bed. I excitedly bounced up and down on the mattress.
A few hours after she left, and I was bored. There wasn’t much to do here alone in my room. I needed to explore again. Luckily, it was still day time. There wasn’t a window in my room, but I could tell because the rest of the house hadn’t returned home yet. I didn’t know where they went. All I knew was that I wasn’t allowed to join them.
Rather than going down the left side, I decided to head down the right. Even though I yearned to visit my new friend, I also wanted to explore more of the house.
Most of the other rooms are all similar, several bunk beds tightly cramped into small rooms with individual curtains. When I reached the end of the hall, there was one door left for me to explore.
When I pushed it open, this was the first room that was different. Inside, there were several sacks lining each wall. Four on each side. The sacks looked had small, clear tubes that connected them to the wall. As I stepped closer, I was able to get a better look at them. The sacks were made up of small fibers, and as I touched them, they stuck to my fingers.
What was all of this?
In the back of the room was another door, but this one had a deadbolt on it to keep it locked. No matter how hard I tried to pull on it, it wouldn’t open. Instead, I turned my attention back to the sacks.
I knelt in front of one, pulling the fibers away from the top part. I clawed away at the fibers, revealing the thing underneath.
It was a face.
The man’s eyes were closed, and sweat glued several long strands of his black hair to his face. I reached out to move the hair from his face when a voice caught me off guard.
“Nahom! What are you doing here?”
She grabs me by the arm, pulling me from the room before pulling the door shut.
“What was that? Who are those people in there? Why are they in those… things?”
She clasped her hand over my mouth, bringing a finger to hers. “Please, keep quiet. You can’t let anyone know you went in there, understood? The others are going to come back soon and…”
Before she could finish, the front door in the living room slammed, shaking the walls and floors. She pulled me by the arm into the kitchen just as the others were setting down their bags on the couch. One of them glares at me.
“Why is that here? Shouldn’t you keep it in the room?”
“I wanted to bring him out to see the rest of the house. He’s getting older and more curious.”
A woman speaks up. “I really don’t think that’s such a good idea. Can’t you just give it the food and send it back to its room? I don’t like having it around.”
My chest started to tighten, and I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I didn’t even know these people. Why were they being so mean?
Ms. Devanna grabbed a bottle and filled it with more of my food. She hurried back over to me, handing it to me before grabbing me by the hand and guiding me back to my room. Once there, she sat me down on my bed and watched as I drank the food.
“Why doesn’t anyone here like me? Why can’t I eat with anyone else? I thought once I grew up, the others would accept me and let me be with them. Why are they so mean?”
I saw tears well up in her eyes, and her head fell between her hands. “Please Nahom, don’t ask these kinds of questions. Don’t worry about them, they don’t matter. Just worry about yourself, okay?”
I nodded. She stands up to leave, but I interrupted her. “Don’t you have anything here that I can do? Games or anything I can play with? I’m just so bored here all alone.”
She searched through the closet, moving things around to see what she can find. She pulled out a small toy car and some books. “I’m sorry. This is all we have. Will this work?”
My heart sank, but I pretended to like her gifts, anyway. I knew she was trying, but I wished that there was more.
Once she left, I set the toy aside and took a look through some of the books. I started with the smaller ones at first, and I couldn’t understand lots of the words. But by the time I got to the end of it, I was able to understand all of it clearly.
I moved to the bigger books, and soon the pile of completed books stood taller than the ones that were left to read.
Footsteps outside my curtain passed down the hallway, and I heard the doors close. Everyone else must have been going to sleep, but at least I was able to stay up late to continue reading. I didn’t have to wake up early.
A few minutes into the next book, I hear light footsteps come up to my curtain. It opened, and Ryuk stood in the hallway. He pulled it shut behind him before coming over to my bed.
“Hey Nahom, what are you up to?”
He looked different. His face now showed signs of a black mustache growing, and he was a lot taller.
“Just reading some books. Ms. Devanna found some in my closet and gave them to me. But what are you doing here? We aren’t supposed to leave our bedrooms.”
“I’m just so bored. There’s nothing for us to do around here, and I don’t understand why they won’t let us leave our rooms. When one of the adults walked past my room, I tried talking to them. But all they did was ignore me.”
My shoulders drooped. I didn’t know he was experiencing the same thing that I was. I thought I was the only one they didn’t seem to like.
Ryuk sat on the floor. I offered him one of the books, but he declined. Having him there playing with his ball was distracting me from reading. I felt bad that I couldn’t do more to entertain him.
“Hey, do you want to see something cool?”
“Not something from one of your books, right?”
I shook my head and motioned for him to follow me. We peeked our heads out to see down the hallway, but no one was around. I grabbed him by the hand, guiding him towards the room at the end of the hall. It still wasn’t locked.
When I brought him into the room, he looked around in amazement.
“What is all of this?”
“I don’t know. I found this earlier today, but Ms. Devanna pulled me away. She wouldn’t tell me what any of this was.”
He gasped as he saw into the face of the person I had seen earlier. He knelt down in front of the body, inspecting it further. Before I could stop him, he started to rip away at the sack, pulling more and more fibers from the body.
“Wait, Ryuk stop! What are you doing? They’re going to find out.”
But he didn’t respond. He just kept pulling more and more fibers away. He only stopped once most of the body was visible.
He grabbed one of the arms, holding it up to the light. There was a small red circle near the elbow. Then he turned his arm towards me to see. There was the same small red circle on the same spot on his arm. His eyes widened, and he looked back at me. “Nahom? What’s going on? Why does he look just like me?”
Now we’re back in my room, huddled together in the corner of my bed. I don’t know what is going on here, and neither does Ryuk. We were able to sneak out of the room, but not before we looked at the other sacks. One of them had someone that looked just like me, but older. Ryuk helped me sneak into one of the other bedrooms to steal someone’s phone, and we found this app on here.
We are in desperate need of some help on what to do before anyone else wakes up. Are they going to do the same thing to us once we reach that age?
Something tells me we can’t stay here any longer.