Short Story
It's not important to know this young lady's name however, I will tell you about her life.
She was born with a condition similar to aniridia except it encompassed the whole eye, not just the iris, effectively making her eyes look pitch black.
She didn't cry, she didn't feed. The doctors tried to find out what was wrong but seemed to be baffled by the behaviour. They sent her to another hospital and the doctors there were just as confused as the preceding ones since she actively refused to eat anything. Fearing for her life, they sent her to a world-renowned hospital to try and figure out what was wrong. Even though she hadn't been eating since she was born, which was 2 weeks ago, she was in perfect health, there was absolutely nothing wrong with her.
They decided to return her to her parents since they couldn't find anything physically wrong with her besides the eyes. At home for the first time, her parents were glad to have her back. Even if she didn't eat, she still slept soundly.
The first couple of years were quite peaceful but a little disconcerting as she said very little. As a little girl she told her parents about the other kids. She told that one boy wanted to be an astronaut, another wanted to be a firefighter and a girl wanted to be a princess. "But" she said "I don't have any dreams, I don't have any wishes Mommy. Why?" Neither the mother nor the father could answer.
That same year in fact, just a couple of days later, the teacher set them up for a meeting to talk about their little girl. He said that she doesn't do anything. She doesn't draw, or color, or paint, or even go outside at recess; all she does is stare at the wall. Dad turns and asks her "is this true?" "I have no interests" she replied. This troubled them all quite deeply.
When she was 10 she was made fun of for her completely black eyes. One day, a particularly cruel little boy punched her in the nose, breaking it. She was brought in to the school nurse who after a little while had to call the hospital once the nose stopped bleeding. "Doesn't it hurt?" one doctor asked. She replied with a simple "no". Intrigued, they wanted to transfer her to a research facility to get results, but without the parents permission, they simply couldn't. Soon her parents arrived and took her back home. The boy became more mentally deficient as he grew up and he eventually got hit by a car playing in traffic at the age of 14.
Nothing else significant happened for a while until she was 17. She walked home from school when a man approached her from behind and tackled her to the ground then dragged her into a bush. She didn't say anything. He first pulled her pants down and then his. She was about to be raped. After ejaculating, he got up and walked away saying "Hope to see you again." The next day he had to have his penis amputated to save him from a disease that was ravaging his body.
A year later she was brought in to a psychologist to find the root of her problems and fix it, no matter how long it would take."What's it like not to feel anything?" he started. "Dead" she replied flatly, face expressionless. "Oh. Then why are you here?" " To simply... exist." "Hmmmm... I can see where this is going. Let's try something else." He pulled out a set of pictures then randomly picked two and asked which one she thought was prettier. She said in the same monotonous tone "I don't know." After a few weeks of this, he had no choice but to drop her. "I'm not getting anywhere with her" he explained to her parents. He also said that she appeared to have no preferences, opinions, interests, hopes, wishes, dreams nor anything else of that nature.
She jumped around from one to another for 6 years. Not only couldn't they find what was wrong with her, she didn't appear to change in the slightest. Her parents had even forced her into drugs, both over-the-counter and illegal, they were that desperate. All that did was make her urine and breath addictive to others. Finally her parents just gave up and accepted that their daughter was incurable of whatever she had.
Just a year later, there was a fire. It was late at night and the parents were sleeping when they smelled smoke. They jumped out of bed, checked the doorknob, it wasn't hot so they ran out into the hall and into the living room where they were horrified to see their daughter burning. She sat on the couch with flames enveloping her body and as her father went to get the fire extinguisher she turned her head to look at her mother. For the first time, her expression changed. Her lips curved upwards and her eyes became wide. The fire extinguisher did nothing as she mouthed the word goodbye and soon became nothing but a pile of ashes.
At the funeral her ashes were spread across the ocean and the parents kept the two teeth that survived; they were the only things that survived. In the news they mentioned that various species of sea life were cropping up all over the world, some previously believed to be extinct, others endangered, and yet others completely new. They had no reasonable explanation for it, all they knew is that it happened.
Just a few days later, the mother gave birth to a baby boy. She was 63 and she didn't even know she was pregnant. They were completely taken by surprise, but happy. He appeared to be completely normal as he giggled when she tickled him, cried when he wanted something, threw tantrums and did everything else that an infant or toddler would do. He eventually grew up to be a perfectly healthy boy, then a man, and soon he himself became a perfectly good father.
They never did tell him about his sister.
