Seven Poems
Just because I left a window cracked for half an hour, my younger brother caught a cold and ran a raging fever in the middle of the night.
Enraged, Mom locked me inside a freezing, thirty-below cellar.
"How on earth did I give birth to a cold-blooded monster like you?! You won't be happy until you've killed your own brother, will you?! Since you love the cold so much, get your butt down there and cool off!"
Down in the dark, I sobbed and begged Mom for mercy, but the biting cold slowly drained every bit of warmth from my body.
Mom didn't care in the slightest.
"I'm starving you for three whole days to teach you a lesson! This is what you get for being a jealous brat!"
My brother's fever broke the very next morning. To make it up to him, Mom took him on a three-day trip to an amusement park.
When Mom finally came back, standing at the top of the cellar to demand if I had learned my lesson, all she received was endless, deafening silence.
Because I had already been dead for three days.