Amel

My life’s been a tumultuous ride of happy seasons, then disastrous times, then fortunate happenings. That’s the exaggeratedly abridged version of ‘A series of Misfortunate Events for Amel Daevers.’

When I was born, the entirety of my maternal family was present to witness the birth of my beloved mother’s first child. That’s what I was told. My father was an orphan who never had any family to call his own, so there goes any paternal relations I might have.

As a baby, I was a difficult one, according to what I was told. Everything I know about myself upto the age of two is all based on other people’s, mainly maternal relatives’, facts about me.

Age three was when I started forming substantial memories, ones which I can call concrete, not mere things I saw in my ever active imaginative dreams and interpreted them as real occurrences.

At four, my schooling began. I was a kid that was above average in some subjects while being laughably terrible at others; my forte being physical education. First year of primary school went by in a breeze. Second year was when I had my first school conflict.

There was this imp who a few grades higher than me and was notorious for picking on younger kids. One school day, when my friends and I, four of us, were playing in the school playground during breaktime, unsupervised as our teacher had gone to the classroom to fetch our water bottles, the mean imp walked up to one of my friends and began to bash him along with three of his lackeys. It was obvious my friend was picked on as the bully thought he was a vulnerable target.

My friends and I went to our friend’s aid. It looked like they were going to leave but then one of them sucker punched one of my other friends and his head began to bleed.

Enraged by this, I formed a tight fist and punched the nasty devil right on his face with a blow as heavy as I could deal. He slumped unconscious in front of me. His lackeys stood paralyzed. My friends gawked at me, I don’t know if it was in fear or awe.

The teacher hurried to the scene. The older boy was immediately rushed to the nearest hospital, my friend who’d been hit and the one who’d been picked on were taken too. The rest were taken home by their parents.

On hearing what I’d done, my mother gave me the silent treatment. My father’s emotion wasn’t rage, instead he was seized with fear. After the incident, not a single day went by without him giving me a deathly stare and reminding me, iterating the words, “You must never display your strength to others, Amel, promise me!” And I’d promise him every single time.

Months went by and the kid recovered, albeit with many stitches. Vile rumors about me had spread in my school by the time he recovered, and most children avoided me, safe for my friends but as time went by, they left too.

Six was when my life fell apart. I woke up one bleak morning to a quarrel between my parents in the guest room. My mother hurled slurs at my father, called him derogatory things. She didn’t calm down even when my father pointed out my presence and reminded her, “Think about our child!”

As my mother stormed out of the room, she dropped a letter. I picked it up and began to skim through. My despondent father snatched the paper away from me before I could take in all that was written, but some words stood out crystal-clear: Daevers, your husband, half-breed, hiding secrets, From an anonymous sender.

Everything about me started to make sense then – why I’d seldom fall ill, why I’d outperform the other kids in physical exercises, why it’d take much longer for me to get exhausted, why I could knock out a kid with a single blow.

That day was miserable. Anything my father would say to convince my mother to stay, that the letter was a lie fabricated to tarnish his reputation and ruin our family, she’d bring up instances that corroborated the letter’s claims. I was also a perpetrator whose existence supported the letter’s implications. My mother left that day, when my father was with me in my room, hushing me to go back to sleep. She left without any words and she took nothing of hers, never to return and never to be heard from again.

The first month without her, father kept up a strong front, fending off prying neighbors, going to work and avoiding all the intrusive questions, dropping me off to school and taking me home amidst all those judgmental sneers.

Life dropped real hard in the subsequent months. Word of my father and I being half-breeds got out. In a neighborhood full of half-breed haters, this was a grave situation to be in. I convinced myself that there was someone out there who knew of my father’s past, who harbored malicious grudge towards him, who was intent on ruining him and everything he held dear.

A day after the news of our half-breed descent spread, orders had been given for my father to be arrested while I was to be sent to a *Purification Encampment. At night, my father stuffed some necessities for me in a small sack.

“You must run away from here, Amel,” he hugged me tight while sobbing, “Run as far as you can.”

He kissed my forehead, stroked my hair and blessed me.

As I left, I turned back and saw a heartbroken father kneeling on the ground. He was whispering faint words. I couldn’t hear him but I could read his lips, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

[*Purification Encampments: Camps where half-breeds are subjected to inhumane rituals, believed to cleanse them, purge their half-breed blood and pray the half-breed away. Now illegal in Eirenai, yet there are underground societies that carry out such rituals in secret.]

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