a different side (peter pan/robbie kay)

2

"...All day in front of hot coals, the sweat and the grime..."

Age 13

The past three years of my life have been a living hell.

I haven't had a single break, except for the five hours of sleep I get every night. The first few months I came here, I barely got any sleep at all because I was so scared of what was to become of me. Even now, I still find it hard to get a decent sleep.

It wasn't because I missed my father. I didn't miss him one bit after what he did to me. Compared to that anger and disappointment, all of this suffering... it was nothing to me. I just hate that I'm losing my childhood to a place like this.

My life is the same every single day. I get yelled at to wake up. Then, I put on the same dirty rags as yesterday and I get to eat a slice of bread and drink some water before I head out to do my job. I work for six hours, I get a 15 minute break where they feed me bread and cheese. If I work hard enough at the end of the week, they give me some bean and pea soup along with it. After that, I go back to work for another six hours. In the midst of all of this chaos, they make sure to provide us small portions of water every once and awhile. I finish my job sometime in the evening, and then they feed us kids the leftover cold soup. Then, once a week, we get to bathe. If we aren't bathing, we assist in helping the others bathe or we tidy up our sleeping quarters. At the end of the night, we get five hours to rest and then all of that repeats again. And again, and again, and again.

There was nothing exciting about my job, either. None of us kids were thriving with the skills for it. All of us were barely old enough to have any sort of decent physical strength. All we did was wake up, we sweat our asses off in front of the scorching hot coals, and we tried our best. It's a hard working job that requires strength and unfortunately, as I mentioned earlier, due to the way we get treated around here none of us had that trait anymore.

When I was first starting out, they got me to make simple tools. Once I got the hang of that they decided it was time for me to start making weapons. The other men around here got me making the easy weapons, but Joey, the guy who bought me, forced me to move onto making the harder once right away.

He doesn't even have a work-space for me. Worst of all, that means they have to force me to sit in front of the hot coals while I shape and weld the pieces together. The ground always has grime and debris scattered around, and it's always unusually hot. I've lost count of the amount of times I've been injured by it.

The worst part of this all is that I don't even know when I turned thirteen. I always thought that when I were to turn thirteen, I'd go on an adventure on my own and celebrate this milestone of an age. This was the age that I was going to learn how to implement my own imagination into my very own adventures. That never gets to happen for any of my birthdays now, because of my idiot father.

Now I'm subject to replay the same day over and over again for years to come. I don't even know what day it is anymore, I just know my days are wasting away by the second.

-

"Bloody hell, not again!" I yelled, frustrated.

I was attempting to make a sword and I just couldn't get it right. It isn't new to me - I've made it a million times before - but today, nothing seemed to be piecing together quite right. One mistake meant a second, a second meant a third, a third meant a fourth, and so on.

I stumbled onto the ground and ran my fingers through my grimy hair. I knew I was going to get in trouble for resting when I wasn't supposed to but at this point none of that mattered.

This job made me feel disgusting. Every day after my shift I would be covered in dirt, sweat, and residue from whatever was floating around. We were forced to work in horrible conditions. Our workplace was dark, dirty and crammed. All of the working stations were lined up beside each other and even though it was claimed that it saved space, it didn't. Everyone bumped into each other and it made the air quality so bad that I had to breathe by stuffing my face into the collar of my shirt. To add onto that, my skin was burnt horribly because of the burning embers floating in the air from the fire and burning coals.

I hated every minute of it and it only kept getting worse.

"Come on Malc, you can do this. Don't make your life worse than it already is," is what I would tell myself; and clearly I'm not the best at self-encouragement.

"Pick your arse up off the ground, boy," it was Joey. "I didn't pay your father for you to slack off like this."

I rushed to pick up my sword - or what I tried to make a sword - and stood up in front of him. In all honesty, he never appeared intimidating to me. But he had a short temper and when he got angry, he usually liked to take it out on someone. That someone somehow usually ended up becoming me.

"Another day of you falling lower than the rest of us, Malcolm. How is it? Do you enjoy the feeling of failure?" he spoke down at me.

"No, sir," I croaked out, ashamed.

"You have a voice for a reason, would you mind using it properly for once?"

I scoffed, "you have ears for a reason. Would you mind using them properly for once?"

He simply blinked at me. In the next moment, he had me pinned against the wall in-between two functioning furnaces. My shirt collar was being clenched by his fist, which lifted me up from the ground slightly. I scrunched my facial features together and he knew that signified me being in pain. That was the thing with Joey: he always dealt with me so forcefully that I always ended up getting hurt.

He dared to inch his face closer to mine, glaring at me as he did so, "I am the reason you're still getting fed and kept alive each day. I could easily have you executed, but I'm nice, so I won't do that. But I might consider changing my mind if you don't smarten up and show me some damn respect," his grip on my shirt tightened. "Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"You better mean it," Joey released his grip on my shirt, leaving me to fall back onto the ground.

Tears blurred my vision as I looked down at myself. I was an emotional and physical mess. My clothes hadn't been washed in six weeks, and I hadn't had the chance to bathe in over two. The combination of dirt and sweat that had been produced on my body made me feel sick.

"I cannot believe I let this happen to myself."