2. Mom, replaced.

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trigger warnings: animal death, mention of suicide.

The reader's ability's similar to Fyodor, but we'll explore that in the later chapters. ;)

"I CANNOT SEE HER."

An elderly couple adopts you

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An elderly couple adopts you.

No, not elderly—more so not-so-young. They were reaching their mid-forties, but their crow's feet and pronounced tear-troughs registered as old to you. The creamy pearls around the woman's neck and the friendly moustache on the man.

You were one of the luckier ones to get adopted; it seemed as though girls were more likely to get adopted as opposed to boys. (You did pity the white-haired boy you saw in the library, but you had never attempted to talk to him.)

They had taken you by the hand, gently, and the new world you faced ever since mom passed away seemed so alien to you.

The woman looked at you as if you were a missed opportunity. There was a revolting sense of despair whenever she stroked your hair as if she wanted to break you and make you into hers. A tremor in her fingers. A lone tear that was well hidden by the wispy strands of greying hair. A sense of shame in how you hadn't grown from her womb. Tainted from another's.

But she laughed a lot. So did he. The house that you had remembered had been rather quiet, a place of shadows, holes, memories, phantom moms blurring together into a centipedal ghost, but their house was noisy and fun, with golden-roasted and warm food on the tables and friendly friends of theirs sitting all around it. It's strange; you'd expect something to be worn and decrepit when constantly occupied, but that was the opposite for houses—they flourished when occupied. You know a house is dead when no one has entered it. It has to have its boiler at least turned on once to reignite its former lustrous glory.

On occasion, Mother would slide you scoops of extra ice cream when Father wasn't looking; and Father would discreetly press extra cookies wrapped in a paper napkin when Mother was too busy fussing over the state of your lunchbox.

Though this never alleviates the gap in your chest. There was just a hole: No coffin, no corpse—just an absence where it was supposed to be plump with sweetness from a wheezed laughter, with ineffable joy, with carnivorous lust for others.

The ghost of mom had fossilised into your heart like amber to a bark.

A heavy reminder of her abandonment.

The corpse of mom had seeped into your chest. The chest and the heart are different: The former thrums with a stinging ache while the latter opens, closes, opens, closes—even in the darkest hours of grief. It relentlessly works to keep you alive. The heart loves you.

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