Starless Child

3. Sticks And Lashes

Every time Hera looked back at the days when her parents were alive, she remembered being sick. Doctor's appointments, prescriptions drugs, cartoons on the couch and staring at the celling in the dark at night, as her body seared with fever and excruciating pain, that was her daily routine.

Once when she was ten she found stacks of family albums underneath Lola's bed. Curious, she brought out a few of them and started turning the pages. They were filled with photos of Lola playing at the beach, camping, going on picnics with her parents. Lola joked that both her and her dad dreaded the moment her mom got her hands on the camera. She clicked a hundred pictures every minute.

That day when she got home she pulled out all the family albums she had from the attic. There weren't many of them. But the photos were very different from Lola's. Most of them were of Hera when she was about a few months old. The pictures of her after she grew up were all taken at their house. Instead of sporting a huge smile like Lola, Hera always looked like someone just shoved a bucket of poison down her throat. She looked more like a zombie than a human being.

Looking at the pictures she realized that unlike other kids, she never got to do anything normal with her parents. All the time spent with them was wasted in hospitals and clinics thanks to the constant stream of diseases and infections that never seemed to leave her body.

But the thing that bothered her the most was that, the diseases started disappearing the day her parents died. Within a week of their death whatever sickness that plagued her body for the past seven years from the day she was born just...vanished.

But by that time, her mom and dad's casket had already touched the earth.

And with it all hopes of having a normal life with a normal family went up in smoke too.

As she was sitting on the dusty floor of the attic with photos sprawled all around her, she nearly laughed at the cruel joke fate played on her.

"Stop playing with your food Hera. You're going to be late. Again."

Hera stopped trying to keep the berries from falling into the middle of the plate.

Granny was in her seventies now. but that was only her physical age. Deep down, Hera sometimes felt she was younger than her.

When her parents died granny took her in. She tried everything she could to make sure that Hera wouldn't feel their absence. 

Hera was all she had.

And she was all Hera had.

When she was a little girl, no one told her how they really died. Granny said it was an 'unusual' accident. But it was a small town. And people simply can't keep their mouths shut.

There were so many things Hera never understood.

Why did her parents go camping without her?

The night before they died, why did her mom sound like she already knew what her fate was?

And most importantly why did her mom and dad kill each other?

There were so many questions. And Hera was tired of asking them. Asking granny wasn't of much a use. She didn't have the answer to why her son would kill the woman he was once madly in love with.

She tried her best to raise Hera. But more than often Hera looked at herself in the mirror and saw a sarcastic, violent, short tempered girl with a sharp tongue that had the power to set off even the most positive person in the world and could see that granny had failed. 

Miserably. 

But Hera had never seen her show the slightest sign of disappointment. Despite of all the trouble she got into, all the fights, the detentions, situations where normal families would throw a fit and keep their kids under lockdown, the worst Hera had ever got from granny was a slight pursuing of lips. Or sometimes she would give her Granny's infamous ginger soup as punishment.