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BEFORE

Have you ever had one of those days when you didn't feel like yourself?



1



EINU

"Einu! Wake up! Show more respect for the dead."
With a shock, I awoke.
I saw the angry visage of my mother almost at my nose. She had tried to keep her voice down, because we were at the funeral of my uncle.
"Just you wait until I get you home ..."
My mother broke off her angry words when she noticed that everyone in the church was staring at us. Even the cleric had paused in his eulogy. She bowed her head, gave me a quick glaring look, then shut her eyes.
The cleric quickly resumed his words praising the deeds of my father's brother, and everyone else in the small church pretended that they didn't notice me. But I felt their eyes on my back. I'm sure they all thought that I was the useless boy that the other children called me.
My mother was partly at fault for that. She constantly called me 'useless', and it didn't matter to her who heard it.
I just bowed my head and tried to ignore it. At the age of fourteen, the other boys in the village would be called young men, but I was still a boy. It was not fair. I had an undeserved reputation. True I was somewhat clumsy. But I put that down to my huge size. I was almost five foot six. Even my poor departed uncle was only five foot two, and when he first came to live with us after my father died, he was considered tall amongst the villagers, who rarely reached the height of five foot.
I placed my head on the pew in front of me and slowly cried. It was not fair. 
I was misunderstood. I loved my uncle. He was a hard teacher, but he was the only one who understood me. No one in this entire village knew what I was going through.
I looked up to see the cleric looking at me. He was a kind