Once Upon A Midnight Dreary (WIP)

People are afraid of the unknown. Why? Well, it's because they don't know what to expect from something they know nothing of. So, they're scared to see what the outcome will be, especially if all their brain thinks of is the bad outcome. They don't try to explore the undiscovered; in fact, they shy away from the unseen, to crowd around in the known. Their safe haven. We choose not to know the things that we might think will turn out to be bad in the end because we don't want to know the bad. It's been ingrained in our heads all our lives to only know the good, the things that will help us, but what we see is only the bad. Humans are a nonintellectual, but still intelligent, species, who happen to fear the absurd because of the lack of knowledge. I guess that's why, in my younger and more vulnerable years, I never once thought things over, only believed what I was told.

My life's story is foolishly strange. My parents are not who they were made out to be, but they were still the best parents I had. I would simply like to say this: my father was not my actual father, but my mother never told him how or why. He was left believing that I was his blood-born son, and not once questioned why I looked so different to him. Thinking back, I often pity my father's stupidity and ignorance; it's almost laughable how he never doubted my mother's words. But I suppose that's for a later explanation; for now, you get the story of how I came to be in this godforsaken world.

Mother always made her younger self out to be this beautiful woman that all of the boys in her village chased after. Because I was told this story as a young boy, I never questioned just how pretty she wanted herself to actually be. But for your information, my mother wasn't all that good-looking; in fact, her hair was a ragged, raven-black mess and her eyes were always sleep-deprived brown. She wasn't that old, but she looked like she aged thirty years in about the span of a couple weeks, give or take. Anyway, Mother didn't have a nice history of her own, so I guess you could say I inherited that bad history. Her father and mother were poor, and her father was always out fishing to make money or to keep as their food. Every time, she told me, that he came out, he'd be drunk off his ass and beat her or her mother for no goddamn reason.

So, the next morning, she would always have bruises on her arms or her face, maybe even a black eye. I think, looking back on this story now, the boys didn't chase after her and the girls weren't jealous of her, they pitied her. My guess is that everyone pitied her and her mother because they knew just how horrible her father really was. My own the most of all. I think he would sit on the sidelines and watch the days pass by and would there never be one that she didn't have some sort of mark on her. Father, well, he was the young boy who lived just down the road from Mother, or so she would tell me. He would come to her house from time to time and chop their wood for them because neither her mother or herself were capable of doing so. To be honest, this was probably where Mother started falling in love with him because he was really the only other person she talked to on occasion. By the way, this isn't my actual father we're talking about; he comes in at a later time.

When her father wasn't around, and my stepfather was, they would strike up conversation while he chopped away at the wood. It came to a point where Mother would sneak out from her house from time to time, even when her father was home, just to see him. They would always go to the forest just outside the village and wander through there, chattering away. Mother must have enjoyed it a lot because she always tells me stories that Father told her back then they wandered the forest. The stories are quite interesting, but I never really saw the point in them or what Mother even found attractive about them. I suppose it wasn't really the stories that she found attractive, but Father actually, and she eventually married him. Her father didn't approve, but he never really approved of anything when it came to my mother.

She's always said that she had the happiest of years with my stepfather, but never specified what was happy about it. They never had their own children together; I'm their only child, even though I'm not Father's actual son. Father was nearly always gone from the house because he was either out fishing for food or chopping wood for people. Mother. . . well, she always sat in the house, cooking what little we had, or sewing new clothes for me. But maybe those were just the years that I saw; years where she looked heartbroken, like she longed for something. Being me, I didn't know what it was, and then she finally told me one day that the father I knew wasn't mine. Anerosa (that was my mother's name) explained to me that in those years he and she were married, she met another man.

Inteus was his name. That's who made all those years of marriage happy for her because Father was "such a bore after marrying him". "Love was never love with Fumishi", Mother would always say, "it just never felt the same after I married him". Anerosa encountered Inteus one day when she was out harvesting vegetables for whatever she was happening to make. Mother said, but I never really paid attention to the smaller details. I was curious about this "Inteus" guy. She injured her ankle walking back to the house, and he just appeared in front of her from who knows where. He was "the most gorgeous man" she had ever laid eyes upon, what with "shaggy, short, blue hair and brilliant, light blue eyes". These are Mother's words, by the way. She couldn't not fall for his beauty. There was something "unrealistic" about him, "no man was that perfect", but she still loved him.

Because I was so young at the time, Mother didn't go into much detail about my father's and her relationship. In fact, I hardly know anything other than his name and a very small description of what he looks like. All I know is that something happened when mother met him that day, and I was the result of that encounter. Whether I was out of love or not, I really don't know; she hasn't spoken to me about my coming to be since then.

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I was shunned all of my childhood because of the way I looked; I knew I was being shunned, but I didn't understand why. Mother told me one day that the village frowned upon people like me. They didn't like that we were different. They didn't like how we were possible. Because of human's ability to interbreed with species that have similar chromosomes to them, we are the resulting outcome. Some of us are more human-like than others. I was told by Mother that for every "ugly" hybrid born, there's a pretty one born to make up for it. I was one of the luckier children to have been born as not one of the hideous-looking ones, but I was still bullied. At that point, villagers didn't care if you looked more human or not; if you had an inhuman trait, you were an outcast. They didn't like you if you had appendages that weren't humanoid; you were seen as something that should not be alive or possible. They were scared of us.

The majority of my childhood consisted of rocks being thrown at me, and being called derogatory names that I won't repeat. Everything was hurtful, but I was forced to live with it because nothing could be done to stop the hateful villagers. If they didn't like something, they would try everything in their power to make sure the thing they hated was removed or miserable. Both of my parents were human, even if one was not my real parent, so I was stuck in the village because of that very reason. I woke up every morning to children throwing rocks at my window and yelling mean things, and adults who would hit me if I walked by them. I couldn't go to the marketplace without being tripped be someone, or having a rock thrown at my head. Eventually, you become used to these things being done to you, or you remove yourself from the offending thing altogether.

Mother decided that it was best I just stay in the house from now on, so that's exactly what I thought to do. I wasn't safe though, not when the villagers knew I existed already; they still threw rocks and various other things at our house. Sometimes, the rocks were thrown so hard at our house, they either left a chip in the logs, that held the place together, or broke a window. I remember shards of glass always cutting into my skin when a window was broken. So many of the shards left scars on my body. One day, a villager broke the remaining window of our house, and a large debris from the glass cut into my face. That's how I managed to get this horrible scar there, where it looks like I'm forced to smile for the rest of my life. They thought it was hysterical, perfect, that I should always be smiling because someone, like myself, deserved the pain given to him.

That injury also caused me to become partially blind in my eye; I suppose a tiny shard of the glass had broken off and entered my eye. Mother was severely pissed off at them for this, and had gone charging out into the open, and I remember screaming and running after her to stop. The villagers were angry at her, angry at her because of me, and what I remember from that day was horrific. They threw very large, sharp rocks at her, or anything they could get their hands on that was in the vicinity. Her screams of pain enraged me, but what could I have done at the measly age of six? Absolutely nothing. Being the weakling I was, I hung at the doorway and watched in horror as they beat her to the ground and left her for dead. When the villagers were satisfied for the pain they caused, they left me alone, but I knew that wasn't the end of my torture.

I ran screaming to her, screaming and crying, and hoping that she would get up and be just fine. . . but she wasn't. Images still run through my head to this day, of shaking Mother and shaking her and shaking her, and her never waking up. I remember turning her over with all the strength in my body, and seeing the damage done to her. . . The blood. . . all over her face. . . the dirt. . . I sat there crying until Father came home and saw what had been done. He picked me up and put me back in the house and locked the door, so that I couldn't see what he would do with Mother. That was the last time I ever saw her, and that was the last time I ever entered the village without an escort. It was all so painful. . . so, so painful. . . and Father, he tried comforting me, but I was in so much misery.

I kept myself locked up in the house day in and day out; the majority of my day was spent alone because father was always out. Sometimes though, if his trips were too long, he would bring me with as well because I couldn't fend for myself yet. I mean, I could catch fish on my own, but I couldn't start fires or do anything more useful than catching fish. So, my life was either spent locked up in the house, or locked up on a ship with Father, passing days by miserably. I truly do miss Mother, and I'll never forget how much she loved me, and how much I want to make her proud of me. I'm not that broken child anymore, and I can fend for myself now that I'm old enough and know what to do. Father did his job in teaching me the things I needed; he graciously took on that role of caretaker now that Mother was gone.

word count: 996