‘’You have the illness!’’ he shouted. Everyone seemed surprised, as surprised as I was. The surprised expression on their faces vanished as they started to look at me as if I have just told them I had killed thousands.
We were a quite crowded family, if we could be called as one. Everything started with an exhausted looking stranger scattering meaningless crumbs of sentences from his mouth, knocking on our door. The head of the beggars, who was also my father, opened the door to greet the man who could not even walk properly. ‘’Help me!’’ was the only understandable phrase he spitted, then he fainted.
He did not wake up that day, or the next. We tried to comfort him as much as possible until he stopped breathing. My dad checked his body to understand why he died, but it was nothing like we had seen before. Some part of his feet was black, as black as a tulip flower. His skin had infections at some points, I was not able to look more than two seconds. My father and brothers carried him out of our house and burried him next to the graveyard of the big church.
We continued our humble lives like nothing happened, I was trying to forget what happened. However, I kept remembering his face as soon as I was alone, and I was usualy alone. Since I was a girl and the smallest kid in the family, I could not work like my brothers or beg like my father. However, our life changed when a nun stated to cough.
Half of the village and one of my brothers were gone. Farmers were not able to leave the village, they had their farms to take of. On the other hand, we had nearly nothing that connects us with the village, hence we decided to leave in order to find a safer place. We could not go to another village, going to an abandoned hut in the woods, which was discovered by my dead brother long ago was the best choice.
It was a long distance to walk, especially for a little girl like me. Forest made me feel dizzy. I felt cold, as cold as the death itself. When we stopped to take a breath, I saw the purple dots on my fingertips, and thought that these were because of the cold and did not hesitate while showing them to my brother.