Chapter 2

I’ve been alive for about a month now, and I’m starting to miss being dead.

I could have been born a noble or something. I could have been born rich to two beautiful parents that adore me. I could have at least been born to parents that wanted me. Hell, I’d settle for one parent that wanted me. I am not that lucky it seems.

I was born in a brothel, and not a nice brothel, a shitty rundown brothel at the ass end of nowhere. From listening to conversations around me, I’ve determined there are a grand total of three whores working here. An older lady that coughs pretty much constantly night and day, a singularly unattractive younger girl that seems bored and generally fed up with everything, especially with me anytime I try crying for a meal, and my mother who seems to be somewhere in between them agewise.

My mother doesn’t talk. Ever. I’m not sure if she’s actually mute or just chooses to never speak, but I’ve never heard her say a single thing. The other two never have a kind word for her. Mostly they just bitch about losing business to her as she is far and away the most attractive of the three.

I’m constantly hungry. Apparently food here is hard to come by if you don’t have the money, and there’s not enough business to keep these women as well fed as they’d like. Although the young one seems to be drunk about half the time, so she apparently has enough money for booze, just not for booze AND food. She complains about it at least once a day.

From what I’ve been able to determine, my mother has been selling her breast milk as a wetnurse for some other infant in the village whose mother died in childbirth the same day I was born. It sounds like she gets some food out of the deal as well to make sure she can produce milk, but that other baby must be sucking her dry, because whenever she comes back she has next to nothing left in either tit for her own kid.

Stolen story; please report.

I’m so fucking hungry. Always hungry. Even on the rare occasion that I do get a full belly, I can feel my body practically screaming at me for more sustenance. I’m a growing kid dammit, I need more than I’m getting, and I can tell. My ribs are sticking out and my stomach is bulging. When I run my stubby hands over my face my cheeks feel sunken, and the young whore takes great pleasure in commenting on how I’m the ugliest baby she’s ever seen. The fact that I was essentially born with a nasty black eye mottling the skin on the left side of my face doesn’t help. Well some food would fucking help, you dumb bitch. And it’s not like she’s a fucking prize either. She looks like a horse, with that long face and those big fucking buck teeth. Constantly sighing while rolling her eyes and bemoaning her fate as a whore here in Tiga, a village just inside the northern edge of a large forest, from what little I’ve been able to gather, as if she’d have done any better in a larger town.

I’m just an infant, so all I can do is lay in a bundle of dirty sheets on the floor in the corner of my mother’s tiny room and cry for food. The one upside of not eating much is that my cloth diaper doesn’t need changing too often. Which is good, because I’m lucky if it gets changed once a day. The perpetual diaper rash is driving me to distraction. I’m really only interacted with twice a day, I usually get a diaper change in the morning and a feeding before Mother goes to sleep. Mostly I’m just left on a dirty sheet in the corner of Mother’s room.

I feel like the neglect and lack of food would kill most babies, but I refuse to die again. Dying sucks, not again.

I’m lonely, uncomfortable, and bored. I seem to remember reading somewhere in my last life that babies can have severe emotional problems if they aren’t given human contact and interaction. As my brain already has an adult consciousness living in it, I’m not sure if that applies.

But mostly, I’m just so fucking hungry.