Nobody. The Girl Who Was Thrown Away

Freedom Sunday | September 22, 2019

Nobody picks me up and swings me around as soon as she sees me. I ask, ‘Are we dancing?’ And she laughs at my question. There is joy in her eyes and I know that she has been waiting for me to come out. I know, because she was waiting for me with her ball and her limited speech and a mind full of misfiring circuits when I went inside to take a nap. Nobody is simply waiting for the scraps of attention that somebody or anybody might toss her way — leftover pieces of affection that she can scrape from the dirt and call her own.

The truth is, I don’t want to dance with Nobody. I don’t want to hug her or sit too close to her for fear of lice and fleas. Nobody, in her 14-year-old body is host to a cocktail of crawling life that threatens the threshold of my personal bubble.

Where Nobody Lives

Nobody lives in a house, if you can call it that — a ramshackle structure that was once a house. There are no window panes. There are no doors. There are two mattresses that once belonged to frames. She dwells in this place with Brother, with Mother, and with Aunt.