Brotherly Love pt. 2

As memories returned to X of their other pregnancies, she began to realize her family had always been in the periphery making matters worse. X was unfortunately (relative to the poverty and isolation to which she was accustomed) freakishly fertile, so despite practicing “safe sex” she had been impregnated many times. Each time she did not produce a spawn she would be degraded in the eyes of her family and anyone whom this information was shared with. The more traumatic the world of her experience became, the more resolute she became not to bring a child into it, or her deludedly cruel family.

After the first on birth control, a miscarriage, B2 laughed in her face, exclaiming, “Do you have any idea how lucky you are?!”

Sometimes she got the haunting feeling that she’d been poisoned and that he’d had something to do with it.

The second, an unknown failed condom, was the one where B1 “just happened to stumble upon” the impregnator online, striking a bond.

The third, he assumed she was on birth control, she assumed he wouldn’t assume so much, she lived with B2 in a trailer rented by her uncle. It was so traumatic that she only really remembers being dropped off while too drugged to know she was home.

The fourth, whom doctors had told would never have children, after he left her, her mother and brothers alike would remind her regularly that she would never do better.

The fifth, an unknown failed condom, was the one she blocked into a camp stall for his half of the cost to take care of it, whom B2 consoled through how terrible it was for him, listening attentively and asking lots of questions, offering support.

The sixth, the mirena iud, her family was not around for. Though they were later broken up by an odd google glitch that displayed “his” search results on her phone.

The seventh resulted from assault, she tried to seek respite in her van at K2’s house on her uncles property to recover. She’d gone to police but they didn’t care. Uncle (the) Don stressed K2, his daughter, to make X leave in a fight that separated the two close friends and cousins for years to follow, while she was homeless, injured, heartbroken, alone. Her long distance fiancé, Bear, was hacked out of her life immediately following this visit, never to be heard from again.

After this, X spent years in an invisible tech enforced exile, believing everything that her phone told her, which was ultimately that nobody cared for her, and that she should kill herself for over 6 years before she caught on. By the time she caught on, it seemed, it was too late. She had been changed and so had the way that others viewed her. By isolating her to almost exclusively being seen through screens, and by controlling perspectives on these screens, there were men controlling perceptions in real life, they were controlling her.