Picking Daisies

It's name

I remember him, vividly, but only for his smile, and the way he always sat crooked, as if prepared to tip over.

His stench flooded my lungs like poison; a poison that trickled down my throat and flooded me inside to out. It reeked of multiple one sided divorce papers. 

I questioned, to this day, if that of what he fed into me took me over. If I am just an extension of him. He was a threatening example of what I could become, and I missed the warnings.

I was not there for long.

"Boy?" A ring had asked, with a tone of nurture that was foreign to small ears.

The said figure sat emptily. His eyes a large, deep, voidish, pool of ink. 

Carelessness. 

His body was a pale sticky purple that sagged and burned in places where one of first-digit's should not have had. 

Corpse-ish.

The speaker smiled sideways, scrunching their nose ever so softly. They pitied him. "My name is Octavia, what's yours?"

He sat quietly. She presumed he was trying to form a response to the question, however, his consciousness was new. It echoed with a directionless hum of an old radio.

"Ellie." He beeps, after an almost endless period of silence. 

I do believe that is my name. Maybe this body prefers something else, but out of disrespect and inner turmoil, I silenced it.

What is a name but a title used only to forget in the width of history, anyways?

She nodded slowly, gently brushing his hair out of his unblinking gaze.

The woman as a whole is faint to me, but her identity in others is what affected me the most.

Her personality I have always known well to be rough in a fatherly fashion, but syrupy and playful in the way of a rebellious mid-lifer. She enjoys games, but hates losing them to put in more perspective. 

Since I had nowhere else to take refuge, I stayed with her for some time.

The household was always buzzing with some activity to do. A "family" of six mentally frail children who were being picked and prodded to recover by two just noticeably sturdier adults.

Starfire was my favorite.

I believe that to be her name.

She was only a bit younger than myself, and had matching interests that sparked our cordiality.

She was daring. An attribute she wore as an accessory. Her brown locks decorated with neon pallets, tiny pieces of childish jewelry she equipped to every corner of her being like a doll; it all further influenced her persona. 

The house itself was spider-ridden and soiled, but cluttered and lived-in. It ached from supporting too many feet; just barely managing to persevere like an old mare.

I roughly remember Octavia telling me the building had been a church before.

Possibly this was it's excuse for such an empty serenity.

Something that was once assorted with golds fallen waist to abandoned muck of it's former glory.

The others were merely a blur now.

Their names, their faces, all contorted into the twirling rut of my memories; reduced down to the awareness of their impact. 

I'm not sure they were real. Perhaps a figment of desperate grasp at life is closer to reality..a manifestation of my own lonesomeness. 

There is one scene that plays, however, that seems too constant to be puppetry.