You always found it odd that there were no photos of your or your sisters before the age of four. Your mum always said it was because she didn't have a camera back then and you all believed her until she passed away unexpectedly, leaving everything in shambles.
The house was just as she left it when she collapsed in town and got taken to the hospital, down to the plates in the sink and chicken left out to defrost. It had all happened so fast that you hadn't had a chance to go back there until she was gone and you found yourself heading there to see if she had a will of any kind.
After three days of trawling through a lifetime of memories and mementoes all you found was junk and old bills and a weird draft coming from beneath the living room sofa. The carpet there never sat right and your mum blamed the old flooring but now it almost looked like there was a handle by the wall.
With enough elbow grease, a good shove and a hard pull the carpet came away and a smallish trapdoor was revealed. The hinges were well-oiled so she must have used it recently which only made your findings that little bit worse, not just for their content but for the fact that she wasn't alive to tell you the truth herself.
In the small room beneath the living room there was a shelf full of boxes of photos and scraps of bloodied cloth pinned to the wall with the names of you and your sisters and two other names above that. You opened one of the boxes and saw yourself as an infant, as a toddler, as a young child in the arms of two people you'd never seen before.
There were identical boxes for your sisters and, again, they were with two other people. People who looked a lot more like them than any of you did to each other and the woman you called mum for as long as you could remember.
It wasn't just you and your sisters though, there were boxes for other children you'd never met.
Boxes labelled with SIDS and PNEUMONIA and TAKEN BACK.
Boxes for the siblings whose real parents would never see them again.
Boxes full of painfully small bones.
The house was just as she left it when she collapsed in town and got taken to the hospital, down to the plates in the sink and chicken left out to defrost. It had all happened so fast that you hadn't had a chance to go back there until she was gone and you found yourself heading there to see if she had a will of any kind.
After three days of trawling through a lifetime of memories and mementoes all you found was junk and old bills and a weird draft coming from beneath the living room sofa. The carpet there never sat right and your mum blamed the old flooring but now it almost looked like there was a handle by the wall.
With enough elbow grease, a good shove and a hard pull the carpet came away and a smallish trapdoor was revealed. The hinges were well-oiled so she must have used it recently which only made your findings that little bit worse, not just for their content but for the fact that she wasn't alive to tell you the truth herself.
In the small room beneath the living room there was a shelf full of boxes of photos and scraps of bloodied cloth pinned to the wall with the names of you and your sisters and two other names above that. You opened one of the boxes and saw yourself as an infant, as a toddler, as a young child in the arms of two people you'd never seen before.
There were identical boxes for your sisters and, again, they were with two other people. People who looked a lot more like them than any of you did to each other and the woman you called mum for as long as you could remember.
It wasn't just you and your sisters though, there were boxes for other children you'd never met.
Boxes labelled with SIDS and PNEUMONIA and TAKEN BACK.
Boxes for the siblings whose real parents would never see them again.
Boxes full of painfully small bones.
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