Red Princess

Chapter One: I am of the Mud:

I look like a walking corpse with red hair.

They whispered that I was born from the mud. My mother said it was true. She had been kicked out of her village when she was sixteen. We’ve lived out in this forest since I was born. We didn’t have a stable home. Mom and I lived in a run-down shack with no running water. We had to survive on our own. Only I went into the village to get things that we needed.

This was the worst part of the day.

“I’ll be back!” I shouted in the doorway.

“Don’t stay out too long!” my mother called back. I turned and walked out the door. The woods were always so quiet. Too quiet. Almost like walking through a graveyard. I will never get over how walking down this path into the village is so creepy. I almost don’t want to do it. But I don’t have a choice. If I don’t go, we will starve to death. Why doesn’t she go into the village? She told me the reason a long time ago, but it’s been lost to me for some time now. Mom refuses to go back to the village. Not even when my grandparents died three years ago. She remained in the woods. I don’t even think they knew I existed.

I walked through the thick red mud that I had grown to live in. It all looked the same to me. Mom complains that it’s gotten thicker lately.

“What do you mean?” I asked. She didn’t give me a straight answer. She just bit her nail and shook her head.

“Something’s not right. Something’s not right,” Mom mumbled to herself.

“Mom?” I asked. My voice might as well have been miles away. I had never seen her like that before. I didn’t know what to do. In the end, I quietly slipped away to my room and waited it out for hours.

Something caught my attention in the mud at my feet. I reached down to pick up a clump of the wriggling mass. Oh. A mass of worms. They all looked stuck together in the red mud. I would’ve assumed it was just a large ball of mud if not for the movement inside the hard frame. I looked at them, wiggling around, trapped.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of those little worms. Did they know they were trapped? It didn’t look like they could get out. The more I stared at it, the more my heart ached for them for reasons that were alien to me. I could break the shell and let the worms out. I started to reach out to the shell with one finger. Slowly… Slowly…

“Ew! Witch girl! Witch girl!” I heard in the distance. I whipped my head around. Two little boys were jumping around, shouting at me. I rolled my eyes. This shit again. I glared at them with the meanest look that I could muster. Those little brats went quiet as they turned and ran off. I huffed and walked toward the village again. Stupid little dumbasses. Occasionally, there were those annoying little kids that wander into the woods to harass mom and me. I shook my head as I wrinkled my nose. Why couldn’t they just leave us alone? Did they have anything better to do? With a sour mood, I walked further down the path of dried red mud.

I just needed to get this over with and get home.