The beeps on the monitor next to my bed increased with intensity as my heart nearly jumped through my chest.  I was all alone in the room with the assailant who put me here!  "You can hear me.....good..." her voice said smugly.  She turned down the volume on the monitor to avoid interruption from the hospital staff.  She sat on the bed next to me and looked over my still body, chuckling as she reviewed her work with pride.  "Don't worry," she said. "I am not going to kill you....not here....not yet."  My mind ran all over the place as she stood up and paced around the room, contemplating her next words.  "We never got to have that little chat I wanted to have back at the house," she crooned.  She snapped on the television and dragged a chair as near to me as she could. I strained to force my body to yell out, to move, to reach out for help or scare her off.  To my utter relief, a nurse walked in.  "Hello!" she greeted my "visitor" lightly.  "How is she, nurse?  What is her prognosis?"  The bitch was acting concerned for my condition, most likely trying to find out as much about me as she could so she could finish exacting some imagined revenge on me.  "Well, her stats look a little elevated....she must be excited to hear your voice!"  the nurse mused.  "You idiot!"  I wanted to scream.  Where was the security in this place, I wondered.  How could they be so frigging mindless as to allow me to be alone with just anyone when no one knew who had attacked me?  When no one had apprehended a suspect?  Where the hell was my family? 

"Are you her sister?"  the nurse asked her.  "Hmmm?"  She seemed instantly to be at a lack for words.  "I just noticed the picture," the nurse offered. She must have pointed to the snapshot on the tray my mother had left.  My assailant picked it up and answered her in an affectionate tone.  "Why, yes!  Yes I am!.  We could almost pass for twins, couldn't we?" she mused. "What time are visiting hours over?"   I hoped the nurse said she would have to leave at that very moment; instead, she advised her that she had about an hour left and bid her good evening as she left us to spend some time together. "Where were we?" she toyed as the door shut behind the nurse.  "Ah....yes!  I wanted to tell you a story......"

"Unlike you, I have not lived here my entire life," she began.  "And unlike you, I have not been privy to such an exciting and glamourous existence......"  "What the hell is she talking about?"  I asked myself.  She obviously did not know anything of substance about my past, or she would not have made such a non-sensical comment!  "I was born to a single mother.  She was so alone and so destitute that when she found out she was pregnant with me, she cried for days, knowing not how she was to care for a new baby when she could not even pay for adequate housing and support herself.  You see, she lived with relatives who were soooooooo deeply rooted in their faith that the revelation of her condition would give them no self respecting option but to force her to leave their home.  Her own mother had passed away when she was just a young child and left her in the care of the only family that would keep her.  They had taken my grandmother in when she was pregnant with my mother, as she had been ostresized and disowned by her own parents when she failed to produce a father for her  unborn child and husband to support them.  It was all very, very sad.  So, the bastarda bore a bastarda.....me.  She ran away without so much as a hint to anyone of her plans, to a nunnery.  Even there, she thought she would find more compassion than she would if she remained in the home of her Aunt and Uncle.  The sisters took her into their covant with the understanding that she would earn her stay by cooking and cleaning and with the promise that she would bring the child up to be Godfearing and righteous."

"The months passed slowly for her as I grew in her womb.  She attended daily prayer meetings and masses.  She studied the Bible vigorously, and with eager zeal.  With the oustide influences of the world within the wall of the covant to persuade her thoughts, her love of Christ blossomed and she strove to be worthy of His forgiveness and love.  The sisters were not easy on her, however, and she bore their disdainful scourns and hauty looks as her belly grew.  They forced her to her knees while she scoured pots and dishes to pray unrelentlessly for the Lord's forgiveness for the sin of bringing a soul to this life outside the bonds of holy matrimony." 

"My dear mother withstood their irrational rantings and remained faithful to the teachings of the church in the hopes of giving me a life better than her own. She was strong and stalwart, unwaivering in her beliefs that Christ would forgive and embrace her to His bossom.   But as my impending birth grew closer, she began to realize that she had no skills with which to obtain work outside the saftey of those walls and knew that even if she fled with me from there, that she would not be able to care for me.  Her old fears caved in on her like boulders from a tumbling mountain top.  She began to devise a way to escape, unnoticed, but I was impatient to be born and one fatefull night, came early to this world, upsetting her plans.  Her diary recounted the agony with which I made my entrance into this world as the nuns prayed for my evil, everlasting soul over her screams of terror and pain in the small, dark room she resided in.  She nearly died that night and so did I.  Several nuns attended to her while another whisked my tiny, screaming body away into the dark halls to have me baptised, should I pass away as prematurely as I was born."

The sisters kept me sequestered from my mother until the times I needed feeding.  They felt that her influence on me would hasten my ungodly soul to hell as surley as she had paved her own path there. Weak, but growing stronger by the day we both lived on.  Unable to be with me, my mother grew desitute and reformulated a plan to leave, make her way on the outside, and come back for me when she could adequately care for my needs.  That day came soon.  She fained illness and retired to her room instead of attending mass.  She recorded  the few last words to me that I would receive for years to come and bid me health and love with the blessings of Christ until she could return for me..... and was gone."

"I never saw her again....not even a picture.  As I had been only six months of age when she left, I never had the chance to know her until I could read and found her diary amongst a sparse box of my worldly belongings. Occassionally, one kindly sister sneaked letters into my room from her and read them to me, pretending to read from the scriptures whenever anyone walked by.  She described how my mother had made her way to a new city, far from the church and found love in the eyes of God and from a man she intended to marry, promising me that she would one day come back for me. As time passed, the letters came less frequently. She had married and had two new daughters...sisters for me, she said.  But the timing was in God's hands, she wrote.  He had not yet designated the hour of my rescue.  The kindly sister continued to bring me the letters as they came and helped me hide them from the ever watchful eyes of the others.  I pulled them out of thier hiding place under a loose floor board beneath my cot and read and re-read them, longing for the day she would catch me up in her arms and take me to my new family....to love and laughter and beautiful sisters to play with.....but, by the age of ten, I was resolved to the fact that she would never come.  The sisters raised me in the same, dark, Godfearing ways with which they had tried to mold my mother's mind, until I was eighteen. I was made to do their bidding and was beaten regulary lest I should forget they were in control of my eternal soul.  So, without so much as my mother's letters, diary and the Word of God clutched to my heart, I bid my only home farewell  on my birthday and began my long search for my family."

I fought long and hard to wake my slumbering body from it's state of stillness, all the while listening intently to the woman's words, anticipating death, or worse, more pain.  For all of my efforts, I could not seem to move an inch, or begin to understand the rantings of her insanity!  So she had a screwed up life!  So did I!  So did alot of other people!  But I wasn't running around hiding in people's homes, trying to kill them!  She was obviously a lunatic and needed to be in a hospital more than I did!  The constant struggle to overcome my body's resistance to waken made me tired.  The pain in my head had edged to a nearly unbearable state as I made one last ditch effort to move.  It worked!  My leg twitched!  The excitement of this moment gave me the will to continue trying.  "Ahhhh!  Look at that!" she croaned.  "Someone is making progress!" "As much as I'd loooove to stay and celebrate, I am afraid that I must be going now....I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow!  Did I tell you?"  she sounded like I wanted to hear the news!  "I have a joooooob interview!"  she sang out as she pushed back her chair and stood up in preperation to leave.  "I'm a newly licensed realtor!"  My heart sank as I heard the next words to come out of her mouth....."And guess who's company needs help?!"