After several exhausting days of speaking with Martha, desperately trying to help her stabilize her wildly fluctuating and unstable mood, the inevitable time had come for us to start looking for work. We needed a job to feed ourselves and survive. Yes, our parents could go out and work, toiling away to earn enough money to put food on the table for us every single day. But this world we now found ourselves in was unforgiving; it absolutely did not accept ziness or idleness of any kind. With the heavy, added burden of having to take Martha under our wing, I knew deep down that the small amount of money we had would soon run dry. This included all the meager savings that my parents had painstakingly scraped together over the years. I was also painfully aware that our parents were not inherently benevolent saints, nor were they foolish enough to shelter and provide for a child with whom they shared no blood ties for the rest of her life. That was simply the cold truth. Therefore, if I truly did not want to abandon such a pitiful, traumatized little girl like Martha, and if I wanted to help alleviate the crushing financial pressure bearing down on my parents, we were absolutely forced to find employment. We had to figure out a way to survive together in this strange, unfamiliar, and daunting new pce.
I sat her down and began to confide in Martha gently. "Martha, my dear, we really need to find a job. We simply cannot stay cooped up inside this small room forever."
"But what kind of work can we possibly find?" Martha whimpered, leaning her fragile frame against my chest. "This pce is just so incredibly strange and terrifying." Following the horrific, deeply traumatizing events that had recently happened to her, I had become her sole pilr of emotional support. I was the only person in this vast, frightening world she would ever completely trust. "Even though the vilgers back in our old home weren't exactly the most friendly to one another, they were never as deeply cold and callous as the townspeople here."
It was clear that she was still paralyzed by the overwhelming fear of having to step outside and interact with these unfamiliar people.
"We absolutely must find a job, Martha. Eventually, the money my parents have saved up will run out entirely. You understand that, don't you?" I said, gently patting her back to soothe her frayed nerves.
Fortunately, even before this conversation, I had already managed to secure a retively comfortable and easy job for myself, thanks to my mother's persuasive way with words right after our arrival. My daily duties were straightforward: I simply had to meticulously arrange the bnkets and pillows of the lodgers living in the inn, handle the heavy undry, thoroughly sweep and clean every corner of the premises, and, if the need arose, serve hot food directly up to the guests' rooms. While it might sound like a grueling physical ordeal, this was actually the absolute best-case scenario. It was a stable job located right there where we lived, and the nddy of the establishment wasn't overly strict or harsh with us girls. Now, the only remaining problem was figuring out what to do with Martha.
It was truly a blessing that she fundamentally remained a very sensible and understanding child. It was gringly obvious that my parents' dwindling funds were not solely meant for her and me to eat and drink comfortably without contributing. And so, valiantly suppressing her overwhelming tension and deeply ingrained fear, she quietly nodded in agreement. That very afternoon, under the gring sun, we took a long walk around the bustling streets, carefully scouting and asking around to see if any pce had a vacant position. We considered everything: she could potentially work as a table server, a kitchen assistant, a street sweeper, a babysitter, or a cook's helper.
However, the vast majority of the proprietors simply did not want to take us in. Our rustic, unfamiliar faces, coupled with the town's rampant paranoia regarding petty theft, meant we were entirely out of favor with the deeply suspicious local inhabitants.
It wasn't until the te afternoon, when the sun began to set, that an entirely unexpected stroke of luck occurred. The rowdy tavern located directly across the street from our inn—a deplorable pce that I had intentionally skipped right from the very beginning simply because I had already endured more than enough of the obscene, profane shouting that echoed from it every night—surprisingly accepted Martha. And in a twist of fate that was even luckier, Martha's assigned job wasn't to work out front as a vulnerable table server. Instead, she only needed to keep her head down in a tiny, cramped little annex located safely behind the sweltering kitchen. There, she would tirelessly wash massive piles of greasy dishes and scrape away the leftover food scraps—disgusting remnants that, horrifyingly enough, would sometimes be sorted through and unceremoniously stuffed right back into the boiling stew pot on the stove. This was incredibly good news; it meant she wouldn't have to endure the rampant lewdness and aggressive vulgarity of the intoxicated customers upstairs.
Every single evening, we would meet back up in our small room, chatting and confiding in one another. While my daily work seemed incredibly monotonous and cked anything particurly interesting to talk about, her experience was the exact opposite. She would frequently and enthusiastically brag about how, while working down in that filthy, grease-stained pce, she was somehow able to scavenge and sneak a few incredibly delicious, leftover morsels of food. This routine continued until exactly two days ter, when she suddenly began to exhibit some highly concerning and deeply unsettling physical symptoms. There were early mornings, when the sun hadn't even risen yet, when she had to frantically cover her mouth, rush down to the foul-smelling trine pit, and violently empty the contents of her stomach.
"Perhaps you should seriously stop eating the discarded, leftover scraps from everyone's ptes," I suggested gently, softly rubbing her trembling back.
"But the food there is just so delicious! And besides, haven't people upstairs already eaten it without getting sick? We can also manage to save up a little extra mon—" Before she could even finish her sentence, another violent wave of nausea suddenly crashed over her.
"Yes, I understand," I replied firmly, "but the simple fact is that whatever small amount of money you manage to save by scavenging means absolutely nothing if we are forced to spend it all on expensive medicine from a herbalist."
A weak, exhausted nod of her head was the only response she could give. After all, her mouth was currently far too busy violently vomiting up absolutely everything she had eagerly consumed the day before. Thankfully, the young girl actually seemed to listen to my stern advice, because after just two short days, the terrible bouts of nausea and vomiting appeared to have completely vanished. But in their pce came something far more arming: a sudden, absolutely ravenous, and insatiable hunger. It was as if her tiny, fragile body was frantically trying to overcompensate and repce all the nutrients it had expelled. According to her own confessions, she had practically gone right back to devouring almost every single scrap of leftover food she could scavenge down in that cramped little outbuilding.
"I explicitly remember warning you not to keep shoving that filthy garbage into your mouth!" I scolded her, my voice rising in genuine anger.
"But I am just so incredibly hungry. Please, don't be angry with me," she whined pitifully.
What on earth was I supposed to say to that? Obviously, I was also constantly hungry. She was younger than me, and perhaps her physical ability to endure starvation was simply much weaker. This uneasy situation sted until the following week, when her stomach began to noticeably expand, and my profound sense of apprehension escated in tandem. Day by painful day, that strange belly gradually bloated and swelled outward, dragging along with it a state of infinite, crushing exhaustion. Instead of staying awake and chatting with me like she used to do, she would trudge into the room and immediately colpse into a deep sleep almost instantly. This terrifying progression continued until one deeply unsettling evening. As she slept, I clearly saw distinct, unnatural little movements coming from within that swollen stomach, which had now grown to be almost as rge as a small cauldron. Terrified by what I had witnessed, I knew I had to speak up. I firmly opened the subject and absolutely insisted that she go to a nearby monastery so that she could be thoroughly examined and treated by a holy monk. And after several grueling days of my relentless, non-stop persuasion, she finally accepted and agreed to visit the monastery the very next day...
That is, of course, assuming there would even be a next day.
