My name is Taran. I was nine years old when my parents told me, without ever saying the words, that I was a curse. They didn’t just say it—they proved it.
One cold, gray autumn afternoon, they loaded me into the back of their car with nothing more than a small, worn backpack and drove away from the only home I had ever known. They left me on a doorstep, slammed the car door with a sound that was as final and as brutal as a gunshot, and they never, ever looked back. Not for birthdays.
Not for school milestones. Not even when I, the girl they had so easily erased, clawed my way into building a life they had never, ever believed I could have. I don’t remember the exact date of that day, but I will never, ever forget the chill.
It was the kind of insidious, biting cold that didn’t just cling to your skin—it slipped inside, quiet and invasive, and it made a home in your bones. That morning, I sat cross-legged on the living room floor, coloring in a picture of a smiling, happy family, trying my best to be invisible while my parents argued in the kitchen. I had learned that lesson very early on in my young life: silence was always safer.
But this time, their words were sharper, more venomous, than usual. And then, I heard my name. “She brings nothing but bad luck, Arless,” my mother snapped, her voice as sharp and as brittle as shattered glass.
“Ever since she was born, it’s been one thing after another.”
“She was never meant to be here in the first place,” my father growled back, his voice a low, angry rumble that made the floorboards vibrate. At nine years old, I didn’t understand everything they were saying. But I understood enough.
I understood that, in their eyes, I was the problem. I wasn’t wanted. That afternoon, my mother came into my room, her face a cold, unreadable mask, and she told me, her voice flat and devoid of any emotion, “Pack your things.”
I thought, with a child’s naive hope, that maybe we were going on a trip, a surprise visit to a relative.
But she never answered my questions. I carefully folded my favorite pair of jeans, tucked in a worn, comfortable hoodie, and I slipped my beloved, one-eyed stuffed rabbit, Penny, deep into the bottom of the bag, a small, secret comfort for a journey I didn’t understand. The ride was completely silent.
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