Charlotte

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Charlotte

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Chapter One: Just Ten.

The church was empty at this time of the day. Many people were at work, those that did not work were busy with other things and all of the children were present in their schools. The girl had known this beforehand - she had, after all, come here quite a few times before - and that was why she chose to come here right now instead of on a different time.

Oh, how she hated the images in the church. She had never liked them, not even when she was little and everything seemed to tower over her (though that bit had not changed much), because she was afraid of them. Everybody said that the statues and the paintings were beautiful and that they should be present in the church forever; but nobody saw what she saw because they had never looked at the images so closely as she had. A friendly smile would turn into a grimace; Christ's face was no longer angelic... why anyone would chose to call those images beautiful was beyond her.

And yet she had entered the church as if all she wanted to do was pray. As if she was not seeking refuge inside of it again. She suspected that they would be looking for her again, maybe asking everyone in town if they had seen her. She shook her head slowly. How anyone could believe them, how anyone could trust them... that was something she had never understood and probably never would.

She seated herself. Not like other people, though, who would go and sit in one of the benches, but she seated herself on the stairs leading to the altar. The marble was cold but not uncomfortable; and the stairs were giving off more warmth than her own eyes had ever done, she was sure of that. But it was not so that she would know how to give warmth to others through her eyes anyway.

Sometimes she wondered if anyone had ever loved her just the way she was. Of course, her foster parents had loved her in the beginning but when strange things started to happen whenever she was around they too distanced themselves from her. At least she had known love. But that hurt her also, for she knew that things could never be the way they had once been, and everyone was afraid of her these days so she could not recall - not even with the best will in the world - how things had once been.

And she was only ten years old.

It wasn't as if that mattered to anyone who had seen her. People would say that she was the child of a witch, not caring about her hearing their words or not, and that she should have been left to die there on the stairs leading to the church so many years ago.

She gave a snort of laughter. People could believe in anything these days, as long as the tales held a good explanation for weird happenings. Like last time when something had exploded, when everybody thought that it had been a dragon breathing fire... Suddenly the prospect of her being a witch seemed a bit more believable, even to the girl.

When her foster parents had seen the slowly darkening birthmark on her shoulder they had instantly believed that she was a witch. And why wouldn't she be, considering the fact that the birthmark had not been there before? Considering that it was shaped curiously like a snake?

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