MOTHER

She sat in darkness, motionless on the edge of the bed. She was exhausted and feeble, as she had struggled and fought for her life while claws scratched at the flesh of her back. Her skin - pale, dull, and lifeless - showed scars and wounds from previous fights. Thin streaks of blood were oozing out from the fresh wounds but she did not flinch, nor did she express any signs of pain. She was used to it. All of this was to her as normal as it was for a person to wake up in the morning or to sit down for a meal.

Her battle had begun at an early age. Those wounds and marks had started appearing regularly by the time she was seven years old. She was scared at first, but as the years wore on she got more and more accustomed to the creatures that came to her at night. She was no longer terrified by their horrible sights nor repulsed by their horrible stench.

Despite this, every single night she would still scream in pain but no one would hear her. Her blood-curdling screams were drained out by the grunts and roars of those night creatures. Sometimes she wondered why no one else could hear those fiendish growls and why no one would come rescue her from the relentless torture and pain.

She hated to go outside because with every step that she took, she could feel everyone's eyes on her. She was certain that people were wondering how those scars came about and why she kept her head down. In fact, she could hear their judgmental voices whispering, sometimes even screaming. She would try to muffle those voices by covering her ears and when that didn't work, she had no choice but to scream at them... Give them a piece of their own medicine.

As she sat in the solitude of her tiny room with white paint peeling from the grimy, moisture-damaged walls, she would whisper words of comfort. "One day", she kept telling herself. One day she would finally have the strength to embrace her fate. She would somehow break free from the chains of fear that were holding her back from evolving into her true self. One day, she would finally be ready to welcome her children - the creatures of the night - and let them feed on her. For she knew, deep inside, that she held the only key for them to break out and roam freely into the real world, bringing with them panic and plunder. She knew from the first night they came to her that she was the one they called "the mother".