"You're the reason why your mother is in so much pain," his aunt told him without sensitivity, as though speaking through an automated teller rather than a person. Thomas, to her, was not a person anyway.
Iris Keller, his mother, looked nothing like him. Fair skinned, brown haired, and blue-eyed, she was beautiful, if hollow. She never left her room other than to take the trays left for her at her door. Her room had its own bathroom, and Thomas had given up trying to speak to her.
"Slanty eyed test tube," his aunt would curse at him, racism apparent, fear even more so. 6'3" and not quite white, Thomas was the result of carelessness. Her mother, as he had learned, was wild those days, and in an act of desperation sold her womb. And there he was now, alive and well. And there she was now, a dead shell, a backwards birth. In the rare instances where she did see her son's face, she would cry.
"I never asked to be born," he said once, eight years old and prone to fits of tears. His aunt would slap him. He'd run to his room, and wish he was dead. It was better not to think of things like that thoroughly, he knew better now. It only made him sad.
Love me. Love me love me love me love me please, I'm begging you mommy, please, I love you, it's not my fault, I love you.
Eight year old Thomas. What an idiot. That much didn't change.
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