My skull felt as though it might split open, a searing agony that made no sense. Where am I? The thought pierced through the haze of confusion. And wait—I'm supposed to be dead. How can I feel anything at all?
The sharp crack of a woman's voice shattered my bewilderment like glass against stone. My eyes fluttered open to witness an impossible sight: my aunt, very much alive, towering over me with fury blazing in her eyes. But that couldn't be right. I had killed her years ago—I remembered it with crystal clarity. Her shrill accusations hammered against my throbbing temples. Instinctively, I pressed my hands to my head, desperate to stop the pain, when something made my blood turn to ice. These hands... they were impossibly small. Delicate. Child-like. I had died at twenty-eight, but these hands belonged to someone barely out of toddlerhood— perhaps five years old at most. Terror propelled me across the room, ignoring my aunt's venomous tirade. In the corner of this damp, decrepit chamber sat a cracked mirror, its surface spider-webbed with age. What I saw reflected there nearly tore my very soul from its moorings. A five-year-old child stared back at me. My five-year-old self. I stood frozen, trembling before my impossible reflection, until iron fingers seized my arm. My aunt hurled me to the floor with such violence that stars exploded behind my eyes. "Are you deaf, you worthless creature?" Her voice dripped with contempt. "Did that fall into
the pond scramble what little brains you had? Or are you just putting on this pathetic act, thinking I'll go easy on you?" She loomed over me like a vulture circling carrion. "Your father doesn't pay me a single coin to babysit his mistake, and you'd do well to remember that he has no use for a daughter as utterly useless as you." Her words struck like physical blows. "It's only my generosity that keeps a roof over your ungrateful head, food in your belly, clothes on your back. And this is how you repay me?
Lounging about like royalty while work goes undone?" Her face twisted with disgust. "You haven't even cleaned my daughter's room. Don't you know how she values cleanliness?" She turned to the cowering maid who had witnessed this brutality in silence. "No meals for this one today. Let hunger teach her what gratitude looks like." With that final, crushing blow, she swept from the room, leaving me crumpled on the cold floor—a twenty-eight-year-old mind trapped in the fragile body of the child I once was, surrounded by the ghosts of a past I thought I had escaped forever.