Sorrow Florens In A Mercy

“Children are not resilient, children are malleable.” Memories shape how we view and react to the world surrounding us. For no one is this more true, than children, as Dr. Bruce Perry, an internationally renowned psychiatrist, is quoted saying above. Children are born with no memories, malleable to those caring and interacting with them. Often, when faced with either incomprehensible, traumatic events or incomplete facts, they are forced to fill-in the blanks with their own imagination. A Mercy explores the minds of children who are forced to fill in those blanks, haunted by an inability to reconcile the real world with their warped perceptions of it. Eventually, through their own paths, often twisted and painful, they find inner peace.
Sorrow
But this immoral transaction was a gift in disguise in the eyes of Florens’ mother. “It was a mercy. Offered by a human.” (195) Florens’ mother saw an opportunity for Florens to escape an environment that was rapidly becoming more dangerous for her. Her mother notes that Florens had begun to catch the unwanted attention of Senor, but also realized that the tall man saw her “As a human child, not pieces of eight.” (195) But Florens was too young to understand the complex social hierarchies surrounding her, only comprehending that her mother was giving her up as a substitution for her brother. “because mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes go when they choose.” (9) Her words offer a glimpse into the twisted reality grown from a seed of abandonment-where a mother’s love is easily stolen by the touch of a baby boy.
Haunted by this fear of abandonment, Florens is determined to continuously please those around her in an unsuccessful attempt to hide from the feeling of her past. In the process, she became what her mother feared most, a slave in both mind and body. “I[Florens] am adoring you[Blacksmith]./ And a slave to that