Pale blue eyes statred sightlessly into a world of light and dark. It was a baby's blue, the kind of blue that would find its color with time. A thin, weak hand brushed the soft skin on the baby's head. Grey eyes, more stone than birch bark, looked down at the arms thinner than her fingers and gently rising and falling chest. She pushed her nipple into its mouth, feeling the weak sucking that did not bring any milk out of her starved body to feed this little life.
Winter had been hard and long, the river freezing to the bottom so even the fish died in the end, far out of reach. Winter apples had been used up, vegetables were long gone and too many animals had been driven to warmer parts of the world for the hunters to have much luck. And now there was this baby, with a mother too starved to give milk. A few weeks later and the animals would be back, the nuts still buried under ice could be dug up, the bark of trees no longer frozen so it could be peeled off and boiled in soup, fish would come from downstream to replaze their frozen brethren, grassroots could be dug up and eaten. There would be so much more food, enough to give the woman the strength to produce milk.
But not yet.
Most children were conceived in autumn or winter when people had more leisure, but not this girl. She came too early.
The woman sighed, her grey eyes looking tiredly at the desperately sucking child. It gave up soon, its strength exhausted. A soft mewling told of its lessening life force, but unbroken will. A pity. If it had been just her having too little milk someone else might have been able to help, but no woman had milk during such times.
Her thin fingers brushed the child's head one last time before she covered it with a warm pelt up to its nose and cuddled closer to her sleeping husband and older children. She had two living children, both thin and weakened but healthy. Another dying baby wouldn't keep her from caring for her family. Nameless as it was it would soon fade into just another part of the sadness she and so many others carried over children they had lost too early.
While weakness made her limbs heavy and her stomach demanded, painfully, to be fed, her otherwise mostly blind eyes were tortured by blinking red boxes.
Warning! Approaching death through starvation in 3 days, 5 hours, 24 minutes, 18 seconds!
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The countdown on the first box was jarring enough. It kept going down with every second, infuriating her in her helpless state.
The next made things worse.
Warning! Hunger during infancy causes lifelong health problems! Immediate action required!
She was starving, and now. She needed food, not information about what was going to happen to her in the next years. She had been sucking, on instinct, just a few minutes ago. But it obviously hadn't been on anything that could feed a baby.
What kind of people were taking care of her anyway? Who would let a baby starve to death? Why didn't the hospital do anything to ensure she survived? And if her mother didn't want her why let her starve instead of just giving her up for adoption?
Warning! Dangerously low weight. Weight gain urgently adviced!
Was what the next box said. It made her exasperated. She really, truly wanted to follow this advice and give the people killing her apparently on purpose while teasing her by holding what had probably been a finger or something to her mouth a piece of her mind. But she couldn't even see who it was. If she survived she swore she would have her revenge.
Warning! Environment unclean. Change of environment in current development phase and condition urgently adviced!
And then there was this message. She was lying somewhere dirty, though it seemed at least soft and warm. Without her eyes or a working nose she had no idea where she was, but whoever was taking care of her was obviously dead set on murdering her. She still felt the sticky blood from her birth on her skin, too. That did not seem like something a responsible hospital would do!
So she was likely born in some drug addict's dirty little flat, her mother spending all her money on drugs instead of food, starving her baby in the womb first and neglecting it criminally later on.
She was surprised that she didn't have a box telling her that she needed to take whatever her mother took in such and such many hours before she went into withdrawal.
All in all...she was too weak to really get worked up about anything. The attempted cry for attention hadn't worked and desperately sucking earlier sapped her strength further. Soon enough, she fell asleep like newborn children tended to.
As it turned out she did not even have those three days.
In the morning, before anyone could grow attached to the life doomed to die soon, her father shoveled a shallow grave in the snow by the river while her elder brother smashed her head in with a stone, giving her a quick death. Watching a child die bit by bit over a long time was hard, but a nameless, doomed newborn, buried within eight hours of its birth? It had no name, no life ahead of it and since it had no name it had no soul that could have haunted anyone.
They buried her, with no marker for her grave, before they returned home for a meagre breakfast of very thin porridge and a small bit of dried, frozen meat.