They never wanted you, I was so unlucky that I was the one they dumped you with.
You’re lucky this is all you get. You should have seen what I had to go through as a kid.
You should be grateful for what we do for you. No one else will ever love you. No one else will ever care about you.
I am on a tightrope, a smile beaming brightly on my face.
I stare straight ahead, walking slow, steady, I do not dare to look down.
I’m almost at the end, I’ve almost made it.
I fall.
Have you heard the saying, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?
It was my un-mother’s favorite.
Hard day at school?
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Didn’t get picked on the sport team you wanted?
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
You don’t like it when I put you in an ice bath and make you stand outside, naked and dripping wet, while the snow falls?
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
It was early, before the sun had even risen, when I was woken up by the phone ringing.
I let out a bleary hello, and got nothing but the sound of manic laughter in return.
And then the line went dead.
Annoyed at being woken up by some prankster asshole who obviously had nothing better to do, I tried hard to get back to sleep but after a while I gave up, and got up for the day.
I had a work meeting at 9, and then a dinner date with a girl I’d been seeing for a while. It was starting to get serious, and I was pretty nervous.
I’d never had a proper girlfriend. Never knew I would be able to get one.
But Rose is great, she’s sweet, affectionate, everything you could want in a partner. I just hope that I don’t do anything to mess it up. She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
At work, I get another call. This time on my mobile, the screen flashing ‘private number’.
I answer and then silence, I’m about to hang up when I hear what sounds like a childs voice. It whispers something ineligible, I can’t quite hear or understand.
A moment passes, more silence. And then sobbing, heavy, wet gulps.
“She’s coming for me, she’s coming for me. Please, I’m sorry. She’s coming and I can’t stop her. I should have stopped her.”
I recognize the voice. It’s.. It is my own voice.
“What.. Who, who is this?” I myself whisper, my brain trying to process what’s going on.
The line goes dead.
I leave work early, feigning a headache.
My eyes are red rimmed and I must look utterly exhausted, because my boss agrees without another word and tells me to rest up.
When she learns about my fake headache,that she doesn’t actually know is fake, Rose tells me she will bring the dinner to me. To rest up. She will look after me.
I don’t tell her about the phone calls. How could I? What would I even say?
Instead she tells me about the ancestory DNA kit her and her whole family had just done. She said it was amazing how many people she was related to, from all over the world.
I was paying attention as best I could, my mind still wandering back to the mysterious phone call. It had to be a prankster. That’s the only Logical explanation.
Rose tucks me into bed, and kisses my forehead when she leaves.
She smells like vanilla slice.
I fall asleep with a smile on my face.
I am not woken by the phone, I sleep peacefully until my alarm rings.
Today is a new day, a better day.
I dont notice the drawing on the kitchen bench until I’m about to head out the door.
It’s a child’s drawing, a crudely drawn picture of what looks to be a kind of purple devil thing, orange steam coming out of its ears and a million sharp teeth in it’s head.
It’s bizarre, and more than a little creepy.
I have no kids.
Rose has no kids, there are no children that I know, let alone ones that would sneak into my locked home to place a picture on my table.
Seeing the drawing brings back a memory, and makes me feel nauseated.
I sit on the cold tiles in my kitchen, drawing in hand as I recall me as a child, un-mother had made me sit for hours, hours and hours, on a small child’s sette. Being 8, I was barely able to squeeze my legs under the plastic table, and they were without feeling after half an hour.
She made me draw whatever she said.
If it wasn’t good enough, and most of them weren’t up to her standards, she made me scrunch up my drawing, and eat it.
She sent me to bed without dinner, because my tummy was already full from the half exercise book I’d had to chew and swallow over the day.
I heard her laughing happily with glee later on that night as I lay awake on the mattress I had on the floor, my belly hurting but I dare not get up to use the toilet. Once I was in bed, I had to stay no matter what.
I hated listening her, and how happy she was. It was as if she was deliriously happy after she had won a battle, a battle that I didn’t even want to play in.
I told no one about the drawing. It was worse than the phone call. I couldn’t convince myself that somehow someone had broken in to leave me a weird drawing, let alone would I try and convince others.
I didn’t chuck the drawing either though, for some reason it didn’t feel right. I tucked it away in my sock draw, I’d decide what to do with it later.
When my phone rings from a private number, I don’t answer it. I just watch as it rings and rings, and then I turn off my phone.
There was a parcel waiting on my door step when I got home.
I wondered if Rose had dropped of some sort of care package, that was just the type of person she was. Kind and thoughtful.
But it wasn’t a care package, not in the slightest.
I pulled out an a4 album, a weathered a worn photo album I remembered vividly from childhood.
I dropped it as a reaction, as if it burnt my hands just to hold it.
I wasn’t allowed to.
There were many, many rules. But this was one of the greater ones.
You never, ever, ever touch un-mothers belongings. Especially never touch her special albums.
But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I wasn’t going to be scared of punishment, of not being allowed to do something.
It was me, all of the photos were of me.
But they weren’t the family photos you’d expect to see in photo frames adorning the walls of loving family homes.
I am only two pages in before I’m throwing up. Bile pours out of my mouth as tears roll down my face.
I always knew she wasn’t.. Right. That there was something fundamentally wrong with her.
But this photo album proved I knew absolutely nothing about the type of evil she was.
I think about taking the album to the police station. But I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
I burn it in my firepit. Trying to not think about where the other copies of those photos had ended up.
It doesn’t occur to me to think who could have possibly sent it, not at that moment anyway.
Later on, I glanced at the box it had been delivered in, and found it had no return address, not that I was surprised.
I throw my phone in the river.
I tell my boss, I tell rose, that I lost it somewhere. I would get a new number. I would forget about the album and sick photos, I would, as I had been doing for so many years, forget the past again.
But it seemed like the past did not want to forget me.
A text message, from an unknown number. My gut churned as it came onto my phone screen.
“278 (redacted) road, (redacted).” That was it. Just an address.
I didn’t want to go.
I told myself it was silly.
To just forget.
But without even knowing what I was doing, soon enough I was in my car, the GPS giving me directions to my destination.
Decrepit, that was one way to describe the home I had pulled up outside of.
Dirty sheets were hung in the windows in place of curtains, trash piled up in mounds filling the front yard with an unmistakable whiff of putrid rotting food.
I went to knock on the door, but it was unlocked, and as I pressed my hand against it, the door swung open, revealing an even worse odor inside.
Newspapers, rubbish, cat shit lined the floor way, what you could see though the piles of junk, anyway.
I felt sick. Dizzy.
And then I heard her voice.
It was a moan, not words. A groan of pain, of exhaustion.
I followed the sounds, and there she was. Sprawled out on a stained couch, fat spilling over from her track pants, sweat drains and God knows what stains dribbled down her t shirt.
“Hello, un-mother.”
The pain had got to much.
“It hurts. It hurts so much. I can’t go on like this. Put me out or my misery. You owe me.”
She couldn’t move without pain flashing across her face, beads of sweat dripped as she used all her effort to pick up and sip a mug of water.
I watched in disgust, and without pity.
She was withered, half the woman she used to be.
Or perhaps that was because now I was grown.
I wasn’t the tiny, malnourished kid I once had been.
I was a man now.
Tall. Proud.
And thanks to her, strong.
I look down at the creature before me, pathetic whimpering coming from its mouth.
Sub-human.
That’s what she had always said, about me.
But I could see it now, it was her that was sub-human, and it always had been.
Her eyes were cloudy, skin sallow, sagging. She was skin and bones, making clicking noises when she moved an inch or coughed. Even her hands shook ferociously as she tried to wipe non existent tears from her eyes.
“Do it.” her voice, sounded like nails on a chalk board to me, making me wince. The sound is raspy, desperate, pleading. “Kill me. Put me out of this goddamn misery.”
I am listening to her, but not really.
I’m remembering begging, pleading, crying.
The time I did get hyperthermia.
Or the time my throat got so burnt with the diluted bleach she made me drink, I couldn’t eat solid food for 3 weeks.
I remember what she always said.
I give her a broad smile, as I deliver the last message she will ever hear from me, and most likely anyone.
She was never one for having many friends, and it didn’t look like that had changed any.
I predict her dying here alone, slowly, but surely.
She wanted me to end her life, said she had a month or so left before the cancer took her anyway.
She is right.
I do owe her.
I say. “No one ever loved me like you did, un-mother. No one ever will.”
And every day, I thank a God that I don’t particularly belive infor that.
“Remember what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Mmhmm. Well, I’m too strong to let you take a cowards way out, un-mother. Terminal cancer or not, remember your own wisdom now. What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. I’ll come back in a few weeks and check how strong you are then. Goodbye, un-mother. You take care now.”
Without another word, I leave, closing the door softly behind me.
Her frail wails dissapating the further I get towards the sunshine, towards my life.
When I get home, there’s a box wrapped in ribbon sitting on the kitchen bench.
It has a card with my name.
Curiously, and knowing I hadn’t brought anything online lately, I open the box, and find it’s a map and a letter.
My smile fades, as I begin to read.
Now things make sense, in a way.
The little voice on the phone.. The drawing..
A big brother trying to make his presence known, trying to tell me I wasn’t alone in all of this.
I wish I had known this before. I wish I could have asked my un-mother, what exactly had happened to the son she gave birth to 4 years before me?
Little Robbie Klien. The brother I had never met, the brother I never even knew existed. But once upon a time, he had, there had been a little boy called robbie who came into this world with the awful luck of being born to our un-mother.
I hoped I had done him proud.
“I know you really hate surprises, but I just thought it was such a cool idea.. And I mean, you don’t need to do anything, if you don’t want to. There’s no rule book that says you need to contact your long lost family.”
I smile, surpressing a little laugh at Rose’s words. I can tell she’s anxious, worrying about how her ancestory DNA gift would go down.
I have never told her about un-mother, about what happened when I was a kid.
Some memories are better left forgotten, buried with the devils that made them.
“Its perfect, Rosie. Just like you.”