RUTH❌

2. the notes

"Is she doing okay?"

Depressingly, I looked down at my little sister lying in her incubator.

The colorful stickers on top of the glass spelled out 'Liv', the birth name my mother decided to give her. I remember sticking them on just last month.

"Every day, you'll get the same answer until she finally moves."

I peered over at my mother in her blue scrubs. Her eyes were red and puffy, like every other day.  She did nothing but work all day and night. She was a doctor at this hospital, and also a woman who feels as if she is to blame for her daughter's condition.

As a child, I grew up in a household where fear and anger ran deep. My birth father was the source of that anger. He was cruel and evil, promised me a perfect world at the youngest age, but instead taught me the true meaning of angst and hate.

He abused my mom for years. He belittled and bruised her every chance he got. But she never left him once. The fear he put in her was enough to make her stay and fear for her life every day. And I never watched her fight back.

It made me feel sick whenever I would come back from school and he called me to his side, asking his "little Jennifer" about her day, caressing me as he also asked how I was feeling—like I wasn't there when he gave my mother a black eye during an argumentative dinner the night before.

He wanted me to think it was normal even though I cried day and night whenever I heard or witnessed the constant arguments and beatings. I was only young, not deaf or naive, but he treated me like an idiot who would never understand.

He never touched me, or yelled anything but "go back to your room Jennifer! She'll be fine." at me. Never, until that one day.

I was in middle school when I saw him hurt Kai, my older brother, for the first time. He punched him right in front of me over a poor exam grade. I cried when Kai's nose started bleeding horribly, and I got angry. I hit my dad and sobbed and I told him how much I hated him. It wasn't my weak hits that sent him into a fit of rage, though, but it was the words coming out of his "dumb" daughter's mouth.

He had slapped me, beat me, hurt me, screamed at me, broke me down, torn me apart, and ruined me ever since. It got to a point where just his voice alone, or the sound of his keys jingling at the front door, was enough to make my stomach turn into painful knots.

His physical and mental abuse lasted until eight months ago; when he learned of my mom's affair with a man who is now my stepfather and found out Liv wasn't his baby. He couldn't get his hands on Kai, who was on his way back home from college, however, my mother and I were the only ones left in the house. He beat us both but took out most of his anger on my mom and the unborn baby.

Even from the floor, I begged for him to have mercy on my mother and my soon-to-be sister, but he wouldn't stop hurting them. The bastard kept handling them with his bare hands, whipping them with his leather black belt, and slowly killed my sister as I looked away hopelessly, still recovering from my own pains.

Fortunately, he left the house, but not before he disconnected the wifi so we wouldn't call for help. Kai came an hour later and used his data to eventually call the police. Then, they were able to locate my birth dad and arrested him for battery and attempted murder.

Today, my sister is still in the same hospital room that she was born in. The abusive encounters triggered a pre-term birth, but she also has a degenerative disease that leaves her unable to see, hear, breathe, and eat independently. She has no brain activity and has been in constant pain since birth, and she hasn't been growing either.