Episode 8

Deserted, starved of affection, the little girl found herself drowning in sorrow.

Sunny had promised to marry her. He said he loved her. He swore he would never hurt her and like the naïve child she clearly was, she took him at his words, his dark motives invisible to her and once he got what he was after, he took off as quickly as an expelled breath.

He had asked her to keep everything that happened between them a secret, —as if she had anyone to talk to— he told her to wait for a week, assured her that her life would change after the wait and the little girl ignorantly and excitedly believed him until right before her very eyes, three weeks passed by with no sign of Sunny keeping his promises to her or making any efforts to see her, even when she went to his shop and house several times in search of him but all to no avail.

With desperation taking its hold on poor Nellie's heart, she found herself searching fanatically for the man that was once so very easy to find; it was as if he had vanished off the surface of the earth or perhaps he was seriously avoiding her but she didn’t want to bring herself to believing the latter.

Luckily for Nellie, on one of her numerous search, she was able to get one of Sunny's neighbours to disclose his whereabouts, she found out that Sunny usually came back home every night. But what surprised her greatly was the fact that she had visited him at night on many occasions and he never for once opened the door to her loud knocking or calls.

She had asked his friends about his whereabouts so many times and not even one of them seemed to know, where he was no matter how sincerely she pleaded with them. So with a strong determination in her heart, Nellie concluded that she had to wait all night for him on the cold hard floor of his apartment’s hallway— no matter how scared she was going to get from sitting on the lonely dark hallway all alone, she was determined —Nellie knew quite well that her decision wasn't going to go without a cost; it was going to be at the detriment of her body which would be brutally battered by her stepmother once she got back home, but she remained focused. To the little girl, seeing Sunny again was simply a matter of life and death.

Things didn't go as Nellie had envisioned. It so happened that as soon as Sunny stepped out of his house the next day and saw her sitting beside his door, he made her instantly regret going through all that effort to find him. She soon found out the hard way that, Sunny had become nothing more than an unrecognizable monster who was totally ready to rip her into a zillion pieces if she dared as to have the thought of crossing his path again.

Nellie cried for days, she just couldn’t accept the cold hard truth that Sunny so harshly and graciously served to her. How could she accept the fact that for the first time ever, Sunny had hit her? That he wanted nothing to do with her? How could she stand the reality that her dreams had once again turned into dirt? How could she accept the horrors of going back to square one? How was she ever going to move on with her life without him in it, how?

*****

Clutching to a black plastic bucket as if it was a life raft, Nellie’s stomach felt as though it had been turned upside down, waves of cold heat coursed through her blood, cold sweat glistening in her gaunt features. She could feel a warm sensation rising through her chest, then, it rose up to her throat, and soon enough, she could finally taste it at the back of her mouth then before she knew it, a small mouthful of bile spilled from her quivering lips into the waiting pool of rancid vomit.

Two weeks had passed since Sunny slapped her across the face and kicked her out of his house, promising to bath her with hot water if she ever showed her face to him again; and during the past weeks, she had done nothing but cry and mop around the house and everywhere she went. Now she was sick, and it didn’t surprise her the slightest bit. Why wouldn’t she fall sick? When all she did was cry all the time. She didn’t hesitate to blame her ill-health on Sunny, she was convinced that he was the sow reason for her state, for if he hadn't made her heart suffer from so much grief, she would have been in excellent health.

“It’s all his fault.” she would whisper to herself each and every time before she would buckle over and hurl into the bucket she so desperately clung to.

*****

Gift had been watching her husband’s daughter for quite a while since her mysterious sickness started. She had beaten her, threaten, and even made her go hungry for three days before she was convinced that the girl wasn’t faking her ailment. She wasn't able to do anything anymore, she was always nauseous and liable to vomit at the slightest provocation, her face had become gaunt, she would fall asleep while doing her chores, no matter the chore she was asked to perform.

The girl’s sickness was seriously beginning to hurt Gift's pockets since Nellie had basically become useless to her. She would go out to hawk in the morning and would always come back at night almost empty-handed; and no matter what Gift did to her, the case always remained the same.

Gift knew it would be the right thing to take the girl to a hospital but she didn’t want to spend her money treating the person that she so believed was the cause of her childlessness and so she decided the only thing she could do for the girl, was let her be until she got better on her own. After all, they usually miraculously got better on their own whenever they were sick. But deep down, Gift could feel that there was something very different about this particular illness.

After a few close observations of Nellie, and also consultations from her friends, Gift arrived at the unshakable conclusion that little Nellie was most certainly pregnant. The thought of Nellie carrying a child irked her so much that she felt like she was going to explode; how could she be pregnant, when she and her brother made sure she wasn’t able to bear children of her own? And the nerve of her to do it under her roof?

The little girl was going to pay for her insurance and she was going to pay with blood! Since she desperately wanted to become an adult, she was going to be treated as such with no mercy extended whatsoever. She was going to suffer for trying to grow up too fast; Gift vowed to herself as she hurried back home to get started on the little girl’s punishments.

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