Sold

"How dare you! How dare you!"

"Dero, be reasonable--"

"Reasonable?!?" I shouted, eyes stinging with tears, fists clenched tight enough to draw blood from the flesh of my palms. "You want me to be reasonable?!?"

"It's for your brother--"

Anger flared hot in my chest. "Don't you dare bring Nicolai into this!"

She stopped talking. I stared at the bolted door that separated my mother and I. How dare she? How DARE she even think of this? Had she not thought of any other alternative?

"It's for your own good." she whispered.

No. She can't have. Someone must have put her up to this, must have put the thought into her head. Someone from the village. She must have been desperate, it was the only explanation.

"Dero, they'll be here any second," she mumbled. there was a pleading need to her voice, as if she didn't quite know what she was doing to me.

I was being sold.

There was knocking on the front door downstairs and my mother hesitated. "I'm sorry, Dero." It was quiet again and I collapsed onto my bed. The frayed, patched quilt ripped the second I touched it. The stupid thing was old, like the rest of...well like everything else. We didn't have the money to go and buy anything, not after my father had died. And since he'd passed away when I was so young, I'd never really known anything else. People gave us charity sometimes so we could go buy food, but most often they gave us blankets and scraps of old cloth that they couldn't use. We all had patches in our clothes; the only two I had were salvaged from the old ones I'd worn as a child. They didn't fit anymore, so we tore them apart and made new ones.

It didn't help our financial situation that Nicolai was sick so often. He's only eight, my brother, but has been in bed most of his life. We couldn't pay the doctors, so we never called for one. No one else could do anything, so we didn't talk about it with other villagers. No one really knew.

The front door opened and I heard the murmurings of a man's voice mingle with my mother's. It was gruff and strong, like Horst, the blacksmith. I found myself hoping that it was Horst, but I knew it wasn't. This was a stranger, and he was coming to take me away. My heart pounded when I heard his footsteps were heavy coming up the stairs; determined.

You will keep away from me, I thought, clenching my fists. "You will keep away from me!" I hissed.

My head went fuzzy and for a moment I felt as if I was going to faint. Oh how I wished it wasn't the darkness, anything but the darkness. No. The numbness started pricking my fingers. No, no please no!

I couldn't move my arms, burning as they were, for I no longer had any control over them. My door slammed open and the large gruff man came at me like a hurricane, throwing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. What he didn't notice was the thin swirling blackness that crawled over the top of my skin....