I’ve been here so long that the faces of those who put me here are blurred and forgotten. As uncaring as they may have seemed at the time, I know that they had no say in the matter. Before the fire, all was well; after it, everything I had was lost. Health insurance only gets you a hospital room so long after you’ve stopped paying for it, and eventually you get put here. An orphanage is what they call it, but “torture chamber” suits it better.
        When I was younger my father would always tell me that everything happens for a reason. I would never believe him, though. But when our house burned down that’s all I could think about. I sat in a corner, gripping my legs to my chest, asking myself why this would happen. It’s just not fair! Nobody deserves to lose everything, but I did! And as I watched my parents melt before my eyes, I just couldn’t stop asking myself that daunting question. “Why?”
        Life as an orphan is painfully mechanical. You wake up at six in the morning and do chores right out of bed. Sometimes I wonder how a house gets so dirty in only one day. After cleaning the house and washing the owner’s clothes as well as your own, not that you have much to wear other than donated clothes and rags, it was time for eats. A lot of what we’re fed consists of the unwanted parts of animals. The guts of chickens and heads of pigs were pretty commonplace. Sometimes a kind person would buy us some fast food or the “better” parts of animals, but that barely ever happens. Besides, after eating something for so long, you start to develop a taste for it. It tastes best when you don’t know any better.
        The fire definitely left a mark on me; half of my body is covered in burns. It’s not my fault that I’m an ugly scarred freak, but that didn’t matter to the other kids in the orphanage. All they could see was that I was different. All they could see was that I was weird. From the moment I was put in here they’ve hated me, and I just can’t explain why. They call me names like “bacon” and “pyro”, and they’d pull my hair. One time they held me down and just took turns poking me with barbeque sticks and sharpened pencils. What kind of monsters would do something like that?