Needles

Pain is always the first thing I feel when I wake and it lasts until I pass out in the evening. I’m pretty used to it now since it’s been this way for my entire 23 years on this earth. It use to be worse when I was a kid, all you had to do was touch me and it will feel like daggers piercing my skin. It was enough to make me drop and cry. It still hurts to walk it’s almost like I’m constantly walking on shards of glass, every step they sink deeper and deeper, but I’ve learned to push it from my mind. It would be the same if I walked, sat, or laid down. I would like to introduce myself, but I don’t really have a name. In fact, none of my siblings have what you’d call real names. We basically named each other, mostly nicknames based on whatever mutation we were cursed with from birth. I just never received one. There were twelve of us at first, but now there are only four. The rest were swallowed up by the cruel world we never asked to be a part of, but I guess that’s just how life is. The Sickness spread across the city like wildfire when we were still learning to speak, our eight brothers and sisters never got to say a word. We didn’t have many doctors at that time and still don’t. Nan says it’s because nobody wants to learn how to be one anymore, well nobody wants to learn anything anymore after the bombs dropped. It became more important to barely survive than to be educated. Nan adopted us all from birth after our parents died from the radiation. She was really strict, but under all that gruff exterior she had a kind heart. I mean, understandably, I can’t imagine someone raising that many children all alone without having to whoop a little ass once in a while. It’s almost impossible for me to even picture her being young. Maybe she never was. She would tell us tales of the times before. “In the time before the sky was grey,” she would say. We’d all be sitting legs crossed on the wood floor. Which was extremely painful for me, but the stories had my focus. She’d tell us of a time when people didn’t have to stab each other with sharp sticks for crumbs. A time when kids went to school and had a full life ahead of them, not this purgatory life we live now. I miss her. At the age of 16, we four were on our own after another wave of The Sickness crashed through and swept Nan into the seas of the void. We buried her behind the old warehouse that we lived in and the next day my brother Nib, short for Nibbles, left home. We called him Nibbles because his teeth never stopped growing leaving him in a constant state of teething. His teeth would grow in rows, kinda like the old pictures of sharks that Nan had, he would have to pull out an entire row of teeth every month with a pair of rusty pliers or risk his jaw stretching out too much. One night I woke because of a scream from across the room, it was my other brother Stem. “Stop chewing on my toe Nib” he cried “Be quiet and stop whining, it’ll grow back” “But it still f*****g hurts” he yelled. “ I better not of heard what I think I just heard, do I need to come in there?” Nan's voice came from outside the door. “No,” they both said. Nan hated when we’d cuss. It was one sure way to get a swatting. I was surprised she didn’t bust in right then and yank Stem and Nibs by the ears out of the room. Like she use to do. None of us knew that she had The Sickness and we wouldn’t know until the day she died.