Apple Core

Twenty One: Older Siblings

April the eighteenth started out just like any normal day: a guard waking us up for breakfast, a greasy cafeteria, an ancient board of checkers. But then at around noon, when a guard told me to follow him for apparently no reason, I knew that something serious was up.

I heard her voice before I saw her, muffled behind the closed door we were advancing towards.

"I don't care if you keep me here for the rest of my life, not like there's much of it. Let me-"

Then the guard opened the door.

"-see the boy!" she said, now fully audible, then turned towards me. We didn't have to exchange words. She knew that I knew, just like she always did. She knew that I knew that she wasn't really my mother.

I noticed that her eyes weren't green anymore.

And then everything seemed to go in slow motion. I felt like I wanted to do several things. I wanted to stab her, and punch her, and kick her. I wanted to shake her until her intestines became a disgusting blend and her old bones rattled. I wanted to look her in the eye dramatically, just like they did in movies, and ask, 'why?'

But then there was another feeling inside me. The only explanation possible for it is that when you get used to someone, you don't really get to choose how you feel anymore.

I felt like I wanted to hug her.

And for a split second my childhood memories came back: when I was four and scraped my knee, and I kept crying but she didn't yell at all, or when I was eight and I went to the dentist, and she was on my side the whole time telling me it was okay to be afraid, I remembered my burning desire for revenge throughout my adolescence, and all the smiles and tears we shared.

Here we see love in its natural habitat: prevailing over hate in places of the latter's major concentration.

But hate was bound to fight back.

"Clyde," she said, breaking the silence into a million bits. I didn't reply.

"Clyde," she said, "I.. I can explain,"

"There is no reason why anyone on this earth would kidnap a baby," I spat out. Love tried, it really did, but hate was the one winning.

"You would have had an older brother," she said.

"I know," I said, "You took that from me."

"That's not a good thing!" she said, "Older siblings were never things to be proud of!"

"Well Ralph is, and I know that because I've met him, nine years ago, and you were too busy burying your own mother in our backyard to notice!" I said, anger rising in my voice. Love was seriously failing. Well, at least it tried, but it had to learn sooner or later that there was no place for it in our world.

"I had to poison her!" she said, "That ridiculous Kate was starting to get suspicious!"

"You what?!" I said, taken aback. I thought I knew the whole truth, but in reality, there was always more to learn.

"I hit two birds with one stone," she said, "killed off my mom, got rid of Kate. These guys know, by the way," she gestured with her hands to the guards around us, "they flipped our whole house upside down, dug her out of the backyard. I hope you didn't leave anything of value in there."

I was staring at her, shocked. How could she have envenomed and killed her own mother without a second thought?

"Oh, don't look at me like that!" she said, now with an impatient tone, "She was particularly useless, anyway. Forgetting our names all over the place. She didn't deserve to live."