The Lamb

by Lucy Rose

All strays loved stories.

They felt lost, and that is what beckoned them to us.

But we are always girls and daughters, underneath. Always.’

I’d had daydreams of smashing boys’ heads against this wall, especially when they were cruel to me.

Real

‘You can’t miss someone you didn’t truly know,’

Kids aren’t supposed to be older or wiser than their parents.

‘It’s not fair,’ he said. ‘But if you spent your whole life, all those years, thinking about getting rid of the bad things, you’d not be very happy, would you? I think we all deserve a small piece of happy. Life’s hard enough.’

It’s impossible to truly know someone who hides so much of themselves and consumes so much of others.

I wondered if this was what being a real human was: accepting you were pieces of other people too. The people you loved and the people you hurt.