The Midas Touch

Chapter 2: Sigrun, age 13

I remembered growing up in a modest family when I was little. We were much like everyone else. Our cottage had a front porch, and inside was the interior design of a standard family of seven, with the living room on the right, the kitchen and dining room on the left, bedrooms in the hallway, and an attic above our heads for storage. My father worked as a lawyer, my mother as a housewife, like many mothers in town. My four siblings each had their attributes, and they were all older than me. Every day, while my father was at work and my mother in the kitchen, we would play with the kids in our neighborhood. There would be at least a dozen or two of us at a time, and the whole street was ours to play with.

Trouble came with my father got into a dispute with a powerful duke. He was fighting in a lawsuit against the duke, and when he lost the battle--I never quite knew what exactly happened, but one day we were living in a cottage like everyone else, the next, we were homeless. The seven of us scattered into different neighbors' homes for a time.

My father was the first to go. It was most likely the guilt he bore, that caused him to end his own life.

Next was my mother. She worked herself to death trying to earn enough savings to buy us a new home.

After that, I lost contact with all my other siblings. When I knocked on the doors of the neighbors who had taken them in, they would open the door and tell me the same thing--my siblings had vanished during the night.

I was at least ten years younger than my youngest older brother. They must have forgotten about me.

When I turned thirteen, the boys in the house I was living in began to act strange. We used to play together, but now they would give me strange looks whenever I passed by.

"Sigrun," one of them, named Biyn, called out to me, when I was helping with chores. He was sixteen, and he had just returned home from wherever he had been.

"Yes?" I answered.

Biyn sat on a stool. "I'm too tired from jogging today. Can you untie my shoelaces for me so I can take them off?"

"Alright." I wasn't part of that family, I didn't belong there. It only made sense that I helped them in whatever way I could. I bent down to untie his shoelaces. When I did, I felt Biyn's stare blaring into the front of my dress.