The first part.

A guarded pink light glowed in the damp darkness, faintly illuminating the close walls and garish toy faces. My room smelled like small children and the lingering reek of smoke damage. The window was open, but the August air was unmoving. Despite the heat, the pink ruffled coverlet was pulled over my head. I was whispering the words on the page beneath my light, “One fish, two fish…”
I was not conscious of the familiar mantra, it was merely a way to help me focus while I listened carefully to every other sound. In the far distance, I could hear the highway, and though there were no cars this late, Mobile or Jackson bound, or even to the state-line juke joints closer, I could hear the vast emptiness of the place where the solid wall of pine trees used to be, and the echo of the whole night sky bouncing off the tarmac.
Closer, but still all the way across the small town I could hear the combined breathing of all the people and animals resting or trying to rest in the hot night, a dog out near the black cemetery on the far southwest of town was howling in its sleep, so softly that its owner didn’t even wake to shush it. It stopped when it woke itself, rattling its own chain. Closer still, near my grandparents’ house, just the other side of the park and across the school campus, I could hear Ed getting ready for his shift at the mill. He was surely not the only one getting ready for work at this hour, but he was up earliest and making the most racket.
In my own neighborhood, near the town park, neighbors were sleeping. Sighing, snoring, doing other things that people only do in the night, at least in towns like this. My own parents, in their room at the other end of the small brick house, were sleeping so deeply that they almost sounded dead. I pictured them so, and what the next day might be like if I “woke” to find them so the next morning. I would call my grandmother and her grandfather would come. He would take us to the neighbors and ask them to take us back across town to his house. It was only minutes away (and of course grandmother would keep us) but it would give him time to assess the situation and decide what happened. He was the town coroner. It was his job. It would not be the first of his crazed and broken children he had found dead, and this, accidental suicide by overdose, would be kind compared to vengeful murder. It could be blamed on the dealer and not his daughter, her husband, nothing but bad drugs. And how sad, how tragic, good riddance. Life would go on... but their shallow slow breathing continued. In the wake of a good drunk fight with good drugs to follow, they slept like they imagined small children slept. Black unconsciousness that would make them ache and cause them to be surly tomorrow. The best we could hope for was that the adults would be kind out of guilt. It was a slim hope.
I tuned into the sounds of my siblings. Only the infant was sleeping, the sleep of the righteously drugged. Doctors would give out prescriptions at the drop of a diaper in these days. Mothers’ little helpers. The older was awake as well, and he was listening. I smiled in the dark, a smile that had to work its way through bloody pieces of broken heart, but when it surfaced, it lit me up like the blanket tent. My wolf-brother was listening and he could hear that he was not alone.



Up to this point, I did not have a collection of memories, only two or three. Falling, and blood and doctors and needles, a flash of one peaceful moment, sitting on the floor at my mothers’ feet asking for food, and of course the fire. There was no gradual awareness, no growing up. I just suddenly realized one day that I existed and that I had a job to do, and that job was to stay alive. That required a kind of thinking that most 5 year olds weren’t allowed, but are capable of, and I had no other choice.
My mother was a thwarted intellectual, who easily learned almost everything that came her way. Large words, snippets of other languages, tricks, facts, illusions. She amused herself and relieved the brutal tedium of her life by teaching these tricks to her first child, but became angry when I learned them and then kept learning more on her own. She would punish and humiliate me for my accomplishments, but fortunately by then I was not dependant on my mothers’ approval.
My father and grandparents allowed me access to any resource they had. Novels, some trashy, some not, the same with magazines; comics, old encyclopedias, dictionaries and of course the limited local library, but I was granted complete uncensored access to anything I found, and so I taught herself to survive.
Some things came easy. The watching, the listening, the learning to hide seemed instinctual, and I was very, very good. I learned to notice and remember things that other people didn’t. I learned to tell by the smell of my parents bodies what the day (or hour or second) might bring. I could tell by the music they listened to what kind of mood they were in. I learned not to trust strangers and to judge people quickly and well. I learned to be fast and guileful. The hard part was learning to understand what adults meant when they spoke, understanding how they thought. The nature of desire confused me, but I knew that only time and experience could teach me these things completely. I learned to adjust.
It seemed as if one day I was just suddenly there, as if I had sprung into existence like a small mortal Athena, age 4, pre-programmed with the necessary survival skills. There was a cloudy, questionable time, those first four years of life, when I must have existed and survived terrible incidents without thought, by instinct alone. That must have been how I learned. There are flashes of memory, pictures from stories I was told about different events, all differing stories too, and the night of the fire. It seems that my awareness began that night.
My brother and I were alone in the house. My father was working, night shift at the mill. My mother was very pregnant, soon to deliver, but she was somewhere else. I will never know where. The fire began in the kitchen. It was an old farm house, the town had grown up around it, and the wiring was original. A spark, some smoke and then flames. I don't remember what woke me. Only that my wolf-brother was standing there, pointing the way out. There was a child gate across the door, and I was too small or too scared to climb it. My brother climbed it and pulled it out of the door frame from the other side and led her through the smoke and flame to the front door. Firemen came, someone took us to our sweet old neighbors’ house and tucked us into a clean warm bed. I have no memory after that for some time, and then there is a shack beside the white cemetery, where we are allowed to stay until more charity housing comes along. We are sick, the baby still has not come. They have almost no possessions and the adults are disturbingly depressed. Perhaps this is where the drugs began. Or at least got worse.
...

tbc