Waif

by Samantha Kolesnik

There were whole days gone by where life could seem occupied by a sense of meaninglessness.

But the dead neither laughed nor wept, I thought, as I drifted in and out of sleep. The dead only existed in the minds of the living, and what parts of my mother my mind remembered were all the parts of her left.

outcasts joined together by one common gene undiscovered by scientists. We were all—Jameson, Reena, Alexei, and myself—born into families not our own. We had to go seeking and searching, lifting up every rock, to find each other. We were our own family.

Family was chosen. The rest could go to Hell.