~ambiguous-aberration

I’d never really known what I was. I hadn’t thought much of it. My presence would cause unexplainable power surges in any area with a lot of electrical things, but where I came from there were so few places that even had electricity that it didn’t matter.
My family lived in a town of what a lot of people liked to call Traditionalists. No electricity other than necessary, no pesticides or artificial preservatives, and, most importantly, no government. We were a simple people living in peace. My father used to say that governments were for the weak people that relied on control and technology to make their lives comfortable. Our kind was stronger than that, he would tell me.
There were only ever two exceptions to the electricity rule, the underground gardens that had to be maintained by things that the farmers called LEDs and the simple medical machinery that the local physician had. If anyone in the town needed anything else they would have to make the journey to one of the big cities.
Every month my father had to make the journey to Northampton to see a special sort of doctor. He had a sort of sickness that no one in the town knew of and only physicians in the larger cities had any idea how to treat it. I don’t know exactly what it was, but sometimes my father would know what my mother and I were thinking without even having to ask us. When I was young, all that I knew was that whenever he heard thoughts he became unexplainably sad. Now that I’m older I know that he had a condition called telepathy, but the reason that it made him so miserable still eludes me. I can only assume that the minds of people in our village weren’t as cheerful as the people themselves.
My mother, however, was the exception to that rule if that’s the case. She was the most optimistic woman alive. Even after the storm began, she would make her own sunshine simply by smiling. When I was still quite taken with Matthew, mum would always have him over for dinner and would, despite strict rules on such things, let me wear one of her bracelets. I’d always liked the green and gold one with the willow trees and suns on it. After Matthew found out what strange things that I accidentally did, she gave me the bracelet to cheer me. My mother knew everything that there was to know on me and my father, yet she still loved us. She was the one that taught me to read and write because I was too afraid to go to school as a child. And when I was older and wished to go, she worked into the night sewing me beautiful dresses to wear. Many people said that she was our town’s personal ray of sunshine. Sharon May Cartret, the light of Old Lamport.
Even the most bright lights may fade, though. She was ill. Tuberculosis, the doctor said. We hadn’t the money to pay for her treatment. My father’s medication was free, but not all others were as kind as the man that he saw. The townspeople held charities to benefit her and, eventually, we were able to afford her treatments. There was not enough to continue them for as long as she needed, though. We were a simple people and simple people are almost always poor people.
When she died, our town died as well. No one could say quite why or how, but after her funeral no one smiled as much. The school mum’s lost the musical note to their voices and the farmer’s didn’t sing as much when they worked. It felt like everyone was lost without her baskets of cloth flowers and homemade sweets to brighten their days.
Though all of the sorrow and grief, it was my father who took up her mantle. He tried so hard to be strong for everyone, but it only lasted a short while. Hardly more than a year after her passing, my father stopped making the trip to Northampton. His smiles ceased to appear and he was no longer a father, but a shell of a man now empty without his wife.
The family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Eddings, were kind enough to take me in when my father’s doctor decided that he was no longer well enough to come home. Once I moved in with them the incidents stopped. I could go to the gardens without fretting on any of the lights flickering when I walked in. It felt like a miracle, until I realised that my stuttering and fidgeting was getting worse. It came to a point where I couldn’t hold anything like a conversation.
That was the time of the accident. I was on a trip to the city with Mrs. Eddings to get glass jars to be used for the spring’s wine and jellies. The buildings were so huge and so reflective that I couldn’t look away, but she didn’t realise that. My escort was a good bit ahead of me by the time that we heard the sound of the auto turning the corner. I didn’t know what the noise was, so I didn’t move. There wouldn’t have been time enough to do so, anyroad. By the time that the noise was heard that auto had already collided with me. I was lucky, I suppose, because only my leg and a few ribs were injured. Well, to be specific, my leg was mostly torn off below the knee.
The man that had hit me offered to pay for medical treatment and, despite the horror of the other people in my city, I was glad to accept. Prosthetics were looked down upon as making someone less than human. It would have been nobler to hobble about than to have a mechanical leg. It was the beginning of my life, though, the summer of my youth, and I didn’t wish to spend it being bedridden and pitied.
At least, I thought that I didn’t. The looks and the jeers and the cruel words were enough to make me nearly forsake my leg, but I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. I was tiring of the strict rules of my town. Every day I remembered the beautifully dressed nurses in their clean white frocks and the buildings that glimmered with man-made light. I longed for the city.
Two years after my operation, on the eve of my nineteenth birthday, I packed my bags and left for Northampton. This, truly, is where my story began.