Rising Dawn (Willy Wonka X OC)

A Miserable Life

What is up my dudes? My name is Tilly and this is my first story, so constructive criticism only please!
This is a Willy Wonka (2005 release) love story, though kind of dark. I'd like to take this opportunity to say I claim no rights to the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory franchise and own none of the characters or content therein.
Warning to the reader, I have been told I write like an old English professor. I know this looks like a lot of text but I have to set up some background. Enjoy!

     Most people use the expression "I'm starving" to say that they are hungry and ready to eat, and they can say this without thinking twice because they've never been literally starving. Starvation isn't just being without food for a while and becoming weak, it's a unique type of pain that eats you from the inside out. At first, your stomach grumbles periodically as if to remind you of what you need. These grumbles gain urgency and sharpness until your body relinquishes as it accepts that despite several audible and kinesthetic requests, food is not coming. After a while, it feels like your stomach is trying to digest itself, searching for something to consume, something that isn't there. Then you settle into a constant pain that distracts your waking hours and causes a fitful sleep riddled with interruptions of misery. Imagine a deep nausea that will never be relieved mixed with being kicked in the stomach repeatedly with a hint of alien-birthing-itself-through-your-stomach and you've got that last feeling.

     Welcome to the Bucket house where this feeling is almost constant. For me, at least. I do my best everyday to make sure it isn't that way for my family, my little brother in particular. Everyday I work my fingers to the bone cleaning houses, doing yardwork for the few priveledged enough to afford a yard, and in general doing menial tasks for minimum pay. You'd think people wealthy enough to hire someone to do chores for them would pay well, but they don't. They're the worst type of people, I tell you. They know I need the money and will take whatever I can get because it would be more a loss to turn down their small sums of payment than to endure the small injustices and get what little I can. It doesn't help I have a mouth on me that has lowered my wages on more than one occasion, but sometimes I can't help seventeen years worth of frustration pent up inside me.

     My mother and I are the only ones working in our family, two workers to seven hungry mouths, not to mention one is a growing boy. My mother is getting on in age, and it won't be long before she's bedridden right alongside my grandparents and I'll be the only one working. Then I'll have to take on work Sundays and maybe during the night too.

     It might make sense that Charlie start working now, but I can't ask that of him, not yet. I suppose I'm working to maintain his childhood and innocence as well as to feed our family. He's only eleven, after all, and I want him to have the childhood I never had. I wasn't allowed to have a childhood, that was ripped away from me when I had to start working at age seven, before Charlie was even born.

     Back then my jobs mainly consisted of mucking out stalls, feeding, watering, and grooming horses, along with the odd painting job thrown in. It was a lot of work folks just didn't want to do and didn't think I could screw up too badly. Of course, each job, even now, comes with the stern warning of what will happen should I mess up, followed by several muttered obscenities to describe me. It took me a while to learn what those words meant, but once I did, I told them exactly what I thought of them using aforementioned obscenities.

     I can hold my tongue better now because I know it's usually the case of a word in between dinner and going hungry. My jobs are different now than they were back then too. Now I can tackle a whole yard's worth of trimming and cutting and shaping in an afternoon. I can clean a whole house inside and out in a single day too. And I usually walk away with ten pounds a day.