Euphemia Is no saint

~Chapter 1~

I was happy once. I had a loving mother and father and even a dog. We were a picture-perfect family. My mother, Sharon, and father, Dale, were so in love with each other. I craved to share a bond like that with someone, but my father told me I wasn't old enough yet. I remember fantasizing about when I would find the love of my life. Then, when I was 10, my whole life was turned upside down in a matter of seconds. We were driving to the mall to get me another stuffed animal for my birthday because I saw this really cool turtle in a store window last week when suddenly we were hit with tremendous force and were sent flying down a hill. When  I woke up I was cold and alone in a brightly lit hospital bed.

 My body ached, but mainly my back, and I couldn't move. I cried for my mother, father, or anyone just so I wouldn't be alone anymore, but no one came. After an antagonizing 10 minute wait, a woman with hazel eyes and short brown hair came into my hospital room along with my aunt Mary, who I had only seen on one occasion. That was the moment my entire world was shattered and I was left with nothing but shards of memories of the past. That was the moment they told me my parents didn't make it out alive, That I was "lucky" to be here. If I were to murder her entire family would she consider herself lucky? If I were to take away everyone that loved her but spared her, would she consider herself luck? I wanted to know, I wanted to test out my theory. 

Suddenly I burst out crying. The nurse and aunt Mary came over to console me because they thought was crying over the death of my parent. It was devastating but that wasn't what I was crying over at the moment.  I was crying because for the first time ever in my life I had thought about truly hurting someone, mentally and physically. I was slowly becoming a monster and was becoming scared that these intrusive thoughts may not stop and that one day I would give into them. My aunt was to adopt me, and I had no say in the matter, not that I would have objected anyway, I had nowhere else to go; I had no one else.

I moved in with my aunt but soon came to find out that she was no aunt to me. Biologically she was what has come to be labeled as an "aunt"; She was indeed my mother's sister, but she was not loving or caring like the aunts on the television. She treated me more like a slave than a family member. We had the same blood running through our veins, but I was still unworthy of love in her eyes. She says I am unworthy of the looks bestowed upon me, the ones inherited from my mother's side. She says it should have been me and not her who died in the accident.  As years passed She became violent and I turned more and more into a punching bag. With no friends or other family members, no one to ask for help.  Late one night she began drinking again and I had to brace myself for something I had become painfully familiar with. 

"Mia," Mary slurred in her drunken state, "Bring me another beer and do it in record time," she commanded. She had found amusement in making me run to the basement to get beers out of the deep freezer, and if I was not fast enough, I would be punished, but the catch was that she determined how fast "fast enough" was and whatever speed I was going was never fast enough, so the punishment was inevitable. Even so, I hurried to grab her beer so she could have her fun, and my punishment is over faster. It was the same unbearable pain that I had experienced every day since I had come here but I had begun to get used to it.

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"Euphemia, dear, what have you done to your pretty face?" Asked Mary once she sobered up, forgetting how she slashed my cheek with the end of the broken beer bottle she had dropped and blamed on me. I stifled a groan that was about to emerge. How I hated the way my name rolled off her wicked tongue. She only called me Mia when she was drunk and Euphemia when she was sober, I just hated anytime she talked to me.

"I fell, aunt, It is nothing to worry about," I tell her, lying through my teeth. She never believed that she would lay a hand on me, even if she was "slightly intoxicated" as she put it. She only grew more furious with me when I told her the truth about what she'd done, never wanting to face how truly evil she was. It's actually kind of humorous how hypocritical she is.

" That clumsiness will be the death of you, dear" She warned. She had taken the lovely term of endearment and turned it into an evil guilt-tripping mechanism, always going on and on asking, "how could you accuse a woman who speaks to you so kindly of hitting you? Shame on you child, you are forever ungrateful"