Cevilla's Story.

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Not a word. Sit down quietly and be invisible. The child, glancing surreptitiously around, hunched her bony shoulders, desperate for her mother to look at her and equally fearful that she would. She contorted her tiny body so it would slip between the chair and the dining table and held her breath so she could get into her seat. The chair must not move and scrape against the ground. Eat. The spoon must not scrape or clatter against the plate or her presence would be felt.

Somehow, she had done this a thousand times and somehow she had always succeeded. But today the space she had to squeeze into seemed a lot smaller. The chair grated against the floor and she was seen. Her eyes, sunken in her sallow face, widened and stayed dilated and she shuddered in fear of what was to come next, as her mother, startled, realised that she was there.

As a child, you feel lost. There is a complex, chaotic world around you, everybody else knows what they are doing and you don't. There are definitely rules. People are following the rules but no-one is verbalising them. No-one is telling you what they are. You have to figure things out for yourself. It's like you are given a plate of creamed potatoes and you have to use it to build a house. When you don't know what you are doing, you just follow everyone else.

Children hate being different, being singled out. Children need to belong. You musn't stand out, have weird clothes or worse still, weird parents, because somehow, through heredity it transmits to you and that makes you heritably weird.

Of course, you can rebel. You can take on a defensive cloak. Eventually, the cloak turns into armour and then it evolves into a weapon against the rest of the world. And that makes you superior. You know something they don't. Your superiority becomes very real - a self-fulfilling state of being. The sheep don't want to stray, but you are allowed to explore the heights and depths of the universe because you are not afraid of censure. You have experienced censure, and you survived it, so you can dare to be different. No. Take it a little bit further. You can lead the sheep anywhere you want them to go. And in your hatred and your contempt, you will deliberately lead them astray all the while telling yourself, and them, its for their own good.

Cevilla had to take this stance. She had no other choice. Her mother had commanded her to be invisible so she could not turn towards her. She couldn't stand being lost and different, so, somehow, she had to make the other children like herself. They too must hide their existence so she would start it as a game. Soon they would all be lost in their fantastical world of nothing.

Except, she broke the sacred rule. She made a noise, and she was seen. Her mother stared at her in horror, then she began to cry. Horrible, pitiful, disgusting sobbing. Her body oscillating in pain, the unwanted child a reflection of her unwanted life and the pain and misery of living every day with a child that had been forced upon her.