Lost Early

Prologue

   This is the first story I've written. It is not edited. 

   .Lost Early. Prologue 

    She woke up, like any another day, yanked from the bed and thrown out the room. Maybe it was different this time. Perhaps she had done something bad but very bad worse than last time. She had been a good girl once. When Mama and Papa had been there, she'd been very good and happy. She wasn't happy now, surely, because she wasn't good. That was all, she must be better next time. She was pushed down the stairs. These stairs she knew. Yes, she knew how to roll and tumble, so as to miss this sharp corner here or there. She also knew how to lay still and quiet, not to cry if it hurt, and certainly how to look very small and unimposing.

    Uncle was definitely a mean man, but all the blame could not be set upon him. The world had hardened him and twisted him in many sick ways. In some ways it was a wonder he could still feel pain or heart brake, even if from long ago. He wasn't really the girl's uncle or related to her at all, but that is what he had come to be known to her as. Mainly because that is what Father and Mother had called him. They would say, be very nice to this man he's a good friend of ours, call him uncle. She knew why she must be so kind to him.

   The old gossips would talk while they watched her or some other kids playing. He was a childhood friend of her mother and father, although both Father and Uncle had loved Mother. Mother had chosen Father, and that is when they say he started to get bitter. He was now the third wheel, among his closest people. His parents had not neglected him, but didn't know how to show love either. He had the most toys and largest house of all the kids. He grew to be a spoiled young man, flaunting all he had. He took to drink and gamble, like his father and hid behind wealth, like his mother. He also took to all the girls, in place of the one he couldn't have. They too took to him because of his high status and airy ways. One particularly took after him, she was very pretty and claimed love. Oh, she did love all the things he could afford her, and the way people would be below her, as his girl. He actually came to love her a bit, she did look great on his arm, and didn't pry or act to needy, like others would.

    She soon cared his child and they were married. Even his fortune, though, could not forever hold up to such unguarded spending. His parents had drawn on it for many years and he had drawn on it for all his years as well. Now she unleashed a new kind of fury on it, not just unguarded but blatantly wasteful. By the time the child was two, the fortune was spent, and they argued incessantly. Uncle grew harder now, as the one he had almost loved in place of Mother, left him and child.

    War came the next year, and he went to it, to spend some of his hatred. Mother and father took in his child, and the girl was to call him brother. Soon Father went away too, he was of very high accord in the area and the government called on him to lead men. Mother, Brother, and the young girl now kept one another busy and cheery. Finally the war ended, but Father did not come back. He had been wounded with but a week left and an infection had set in. He never did return to Mother or the girl again.

    Uncle did come back, however, and with a very strange peace around him, as if he had truly spent all of his bad feelings in the war. Mother grieved and Uncle stayed with by her side. Still she never loved him, her heart torn from the one it had always been. His hardness came out, sharper than ever before. Mother never did see his pain, for there was a sickness in her now. It gripped her hard, till death pulled her into its embrace. The girl was but four now, her father a distant shadow, and her mother a sad smile. That was all she had now of them and the lace handkerchief her mother had made covering their wedding photo she had hid and hardly dared look at, for surely Uncle would have ripped it up. All the love Uncle had faintly felt once was gone now. He had only disdain and pure hatred, for the tiny little reminder that was left in his care.