Iris

...that my mother left.

It wasn't all at once, and it wasn't right away. It never is, you know. It had been going on for some time, I guess, between my mother and my father. And bringing you in was sort of the catalyst event for them to decide whether or not they were going to stay together, to stick it through. My mother didn't want anything to do with housing a slave from the Red Light District and my father told her that if she was willing to abandon someone like you, she might as well get out of the house right now. So she did. There were things thrown. I stayed in the room with you. I took care of you while they were fighting. I was cleaning you up more than we had that afternoon. I was rubbing medicine into your wounds because you weren't awake to scream at how terrible the pain must have been. I rubbed harder the louder they fought.

When it was finally over, my father came into the room to see me lying next to you, tears streaming down my eyes and into your hair. I felt kind of bad about that but tears are natural so probably they didn't do any damage.

"She's gone," he said quietly.

The words held different meanings. She was physically gone, but she'd been "gone" for quite some time now. Nothing held the joy for her that it used to. She played piano a while ago. She was fantastic at it. Neighbors would stop by our house and peek in the windows to see her weaving intricate melodies and harmonies layered over each other. She never noticed. She was in her element.

The piano had a layer of dust on it and had for the past fourteen months.

She had become nothing. Tired. Depressed. Irritated all the time.

So it wasn't a surprise that she finally left.

My father sat across from me, on your other side. He looked at you like he might look at a pet - deserving of love, but maybe not the same kind of love that humans received. That was fine. I didn't mind. Kids like me were way more accepting of people different than them. Adults had been hardened by the world. By bills, by responsibilities, by jobs. I couldn't expect him to see you as a person like us.

"We'll have to wait until he wakes up," he said, "and then ask him where he came from. Maybe we can return him to whoever owned him."

"I don't think he would want to go there, Dad. It looks like he didn't enjoy it much." I indicated the scars and wounds and the cut along your jaw that looked like it had been made by the graze of a knife.

Dad shrugged. "We'll see. For now, he has to rest. Keep doing whatever it is you're doing. It's probably helping."

My father trusted in the distinction between males and females in the society we lived in. Although it wasn't like females couldn't get the same hard-working, high-paying jobs as males, they tended to go into medicinal careers. I'd been taught since the time I was a young girl what plants and herbs and so on did what for a person's health, and so I was probably the most qualified person in the house to take care of you. My grandmother lived in the guest room, but she was sixty-five and quickly approaching the age where she would forget most of the herbal knowledge that she had been learning her entire life. By ninety she would have forgotten nearly everything, and then she could start her leisurely days of retirement until she neared one hundred and fifty or so and died. When I told you that, you were amazed. You didn't know how a person could live that long. You said people like you usually died around sixty at the very most, and you held me close while I cried for everything that had been taken from you.

That was later on, though. When I could hear your beautiful voice. I couldn't do that yet. Your lips were parted ever so slightly and you were breathing, but that was all you were doing.

I traced the name on your chest. Kellin. Birth name, or given? I wished I knew. I didn't want the first word out of my mouth to be a name that wasn't even yours.

I fell asleep next to you. My head was resting on the tattoo of hopefully-your-name.