Dear Lucy, it wasn’t your fault you were born
Chapter One
This is not a happy story. Fair warning dear reader, this story does not end well. If there are times in this story when you think I am changing my mind and you become hopeful for a better story, I urge you to turn on the news, or listen to a sad song. It’ll put you right back where you need to be if you’re going to continue reading.
Another thing; if you have not experienced gut wrenching pain, where you’d rather take a knife to your wrists or a noose to your neck or even bleach to your insides, this story will seem a little exaggerated in its sadness. To those readers, I say, first this is a journey you might not want to consider too fast. I’m a firm believer that everything you come into contact with affects your purity and so this may give you awful ideas where it is not intended to. In any case, I’m sorry; for those who know these kinds of stories all too well, and to those who are affected by them anyways.
It all began with Lucy’s birth. No wait, perhaps that’s a bit too far in to tell you. Maybe I’ll start like this; it all began with the attempted abortions. Alice sat crouching over the edge of her bed time and time again trying everything, from coat hanger to unnatural squeezing around her midsection to premature promises to Satan (the idea of God had long ago vanished after this one would not go away as easily as the others). Alice tried harder at this than she had anything in her life but the child persisted, and so Alice‘s lifestyle persisted. Spurning this troublesome pregnancy Alice drank all she wanted and snorted all she could get her hands on. She was wilder than usual with the lingering excuse that she was going to clean up her act once the fixated thing slid out of her.
On the day of, Alice felt the first pangs and decided that she was going to take it out before it hit the ground. Armed with a fifth of vodka she drank the pain away and waited to feel the crowning but maybe the kid learned something because Alice remained dilated at four centimetres for the better part of ten hours until it was unbearable and she had to call an ambulance and was carted off to hospital. If the state of her, sickened the doctor, he made clear not to show it and immediately informed her she would have to endure a caesarean. Drunk on vodka, misery and the enduring testament that God does love to protect little children, Alice agreed and off to surgery she was carted. A few hours later when her mother came to see her Alice insisted she was going to take care of it.
Thus began Lucy’s introduction to sadness. Contrary to her pre-birth behaviour the bravery that Lucy had displayed at defying her mother’s forceful attempts to get rid of her would never again reoccur for the duration of her life. From then on, Lucy was to spend the rest of her days overwhelmed by a crippling, sometimes unknown sometimes not, fear.
Lucy survived the first few years of her life the same way a certain man I know survived through his schooling, barely and with so much luck it almost seemed like cheating. Her first one and a half years was seen through by relatives, Jesus Christ himself and stray cats that wandered in whenever her mother went out. After Lucy could walk and talk a little, the relatives felt discharged of their duty and the cheap flat became quiet, occupied by unwilling Lucy and unwilling Alice. Every morning her mother would leave for a day of mediocre work and enthusiastic philandering. She would feed Lucy before she left and if she was still in the right frame of mind when she got back the malnourished child would get more. But children have particularly strong constitutions especially in the most adverse of circumstances. This is not to say that Lucy had the best of health but she certainly was doing much better than she should have been.
There is a theory that states that the universe is all about energy and every bit of energy radiated by people to and at each other will affect them in some way. Her mother’s promiscuity was to affect Lucy later in her life to a degree that it was nothing less than crippling. On this note perhaps, it may be prudent to say that Alice was not necessarily a terrible person; she’d just left decision making to the whims of her desires and believed so strongly in her own helplessness that she’d truly become unable to control herself. The hardships of life are unimaginable and Alice had been subjected to perhaps one of the worst; never believing she was good enough. Settling for average, she hit far below the target and spiralled fast out of control. She believed in love but the men she met equated love with sex and so she believed in sex and in a roundabout way, she’d become so great at living a terrible lifestyle that the thought of getting better made her ill on the inside. She hated herself so much for being a terrible mother that she began to hate her child for making her a mother. And thus began the beatings.
Now anyone who has ever gotten angry and lashed out at another person can tell you that it is both the most exhilarating and terrible thing to get a reaction from them. After the first few, disciplinary of course (or so Alice assured herself), Alice found that inflicting pain gave her a form of power she'd never experienced before. It was power she didn’t have to work for and it felt good to be able to lord over someone else for a change. Her cruelty became unlimited, everything from burning the child to whipping to verbal abuse. It was then, I am sorry to say, that Alice sealed her karmic fate. Everything about her up to that point had seemed pitiable, but the cruelty was malice incarnate and could no longer go unnoticed, or unpunished.
The gods sometimes choose to remain woefully ignorant of the goings on, on Earth. The dictates of free will are somewhat binding on them and quite frankly, man turned to evil like a child turned to stealing sugar when it knew it was wrong and they resorted to watching and intervening through the power they instilled in the energy of the earth which most people commonly refer to as karma. This principle meant that as the good was rewarded the bad was punished, but time passes slow in the realm of the gods, outside the reaches of knowledge and existence. Fortunately for our story and unfortunately for one of our main characters (whose life ends shortly), karma was acting like a factory expecting an inspection.
On a day much like one you have experienced today, Alice went further than she should have. After a particularly terrible round of beatings, little Lucy was left limp on the floor. Ignorant to her mother’s pleading that she wake up it seemed the child was dying and if you, like myself, has tried to hide a corpse you will know that not only is it difficult to hide it but it is also difficult to feign amnesia as regards the existence of said corpse to the outside world. And so there was no choice but to go to hospital. The doctors immediately attended to the now three year old Lucy while the authorities questioned her mother. Alice and I are both wonderful actresses and so she escaped punishment (like I escaped paying for a taxi cab through a woeful story of injured animals and the assassination of JFK). When Lucy was well enough to return home, her mother bundled her up like the caregiver she was not and set off down the street to their apartment block hand in hand. It was the fondest memory Lucy had of her mother, and unironically, the last. In attempting to cross a busy intersection, Alice’s body, moving at less than one kilometre per hour collided with a motorbike moving at eighty kilometres per hour. Lucy was thrown alongside her mother’s body but the landing was softened by Alice’s torso which was at this point, semi-detached from the head. The scene was worse than ugly. It was the stuff of Hitchcockian fantasy and Tarantinic dreams. It was awful for poor Lucy, who could never get the image out of her mind until the day she died. After all was said and established, Lucy’s relatives refused to take her in citing religious nonsense and superstitious bile. And so Lucy was placed in a car with her few worldly belongings and sent off to a place located a ways away from the town, a building of imposing stature and a grim aura with large iron wrought gates at the forefront of which was embossed the words ‘MUSQORN COUNTY ORPHANAGE.’
Title: Lucy Love
Genre : YA
Word Count: (current submission is 1524 words long.)
Author's name : Mitchel Ondili
Why my project is a good fit: It fills a gap in the hearts of every lonely book lover. It' a book that doesn't beg to be understood, it lays out its story and you laugh and cry and groan your sympathy and love Lucy.
Synopsis: a young girl, is born in unfortunate circumstances and spends the rest of her life trying to find the place she fits perfectly into. On the way she finds and loses hope, finds and loses friends, finds and loses herself.
Target audience : 11-26 years
My bio: I'm a 20 year old law school student living in Nairobi, Kenya and I love to write, to read and to be influenced by the ever expanding world of writers and poets around me.