She calls me Girl. I call her Mother. I’m talking to you girl. Girl are you listening. What goes on in that head of yours girl. I do not even smile when she says these things. She does not want to know what goes on my head. And I cannot tell her, you are my mother only on paper. Only in name. As Father is only my father on paper.
I am not their child. I am no one’s child. Jim is the only real family I have. We grew up together, and he knows all my thoughts and he sings them to me. We are fire and forest, serpent and tree. I can’t even recall a time before Jim.
Father-on-paper lives across town, with a slim-hipped blond whose name I forget. “Twenty-something” is what Mother calls her. Abandoned us, she says, for Twenty-something. In truth she is thirty. And Father left Mother for many reasons.
I am not warm, or out-going or friendly. I am not friends with the girls in my school. They seem silly to me. Soap bubbles
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