Sable Monroe

I was about five or six when I learned I wasn’t an only child after all.

My father didn’t introduce the news gently. Nothing in my childhood arrived gently. It came like a slap of cold water.

One day I thought I was the only daughter in the world he had. The next, I was standing in front of a boy who shared my blood.

My father drove me deep into the countryside to meet him, where his mother lived in a house that didn’t

have running water. They collected rain in a large steel drum outside, and that was used for everything— cooking, bathing, washing dishes. It was the kind of poverty I had never seen before.

I remember the boy. Barefoot. Thin. Clothes worn soft from wear.

And silent.

So silent.

He didn’t speak a word that day. Didn’t ask a question. Didn’t even look me directly in the eye. He hovered near his mother the way shy children do when strangers show up — not afraid enough to run, too unsure to step forward.

Later, when my father brought him to live with his own mother in Kingston, he finally spoke. He asked me about food — not toys, not games, not school — food. Did I eat well? Did we have plenty? What did dinner look like?

I answered truthfully. I didn’t understand that honesty could hurt.

He begged my father to let him live with us. And for a short while, he did.

But “better” wasn’t better. The violence in our home frightened him in ways I had already learned to normalize.

He struggled with schoolwork and suffered beatings. And one night, he cried and begged to go back — not to the countryside, but to my father’s mother’s house where scarcity was predictable.

He blamed me for not warning him. I didn’t know how to explain that I didn’t know violence was something to warn people about.

Children don’t compare suffering — they compare comfort.

We were siblings divided by the same father, learning too early that in our family, love didn’t mean safety.