In an open patch of dirt behind a school in a scarcely-known village, a little girl played with a stray cat.
At first, all she did was observe the feline. The cat barely acknowledged the girl's presence, pacing back and forth with its nose pointed towards the ground and its tail held up high.
The girl knelt and moved her hand across the cat's front leg, watching as the cat stopped abruptly in its tracks and began to screech sharply.
She tightened her hand into a fist and the cat screeched even louder, its entire body writhing and contorting in pain. As the cat opened and closed its mouth, its screams only increasing in intensity, the girl's outward expression remained impassive.
"What… are you doing?"
She stopped and looked up. There was small boy looking over her shoulder, down at her. His gaze moved from her face to her hands and finally to the cat, which was now collapsed on the ground, breathing roughly.
"Nothing," she replied.
When she stood and moved past the boy, out of the corner of her eye, she could see the cat push itself off the ground and limp away, into a bush and out of sight.
When the girl who would become Aversa was born, the first to shun her were her own parents.
The child's father was a priest from a church in their village. Upon seeing the dark marks on his newborn daughter's face, he flew into a rage. Horrified that he had brought a monstrosity into the world, the man demanded that the child's mother abandon the girl or leave her with another family.
And when the mother refused, telling him that their daughter would have a normal and wonderful life ahead, the man took the baby girl in the middle of the night, carried her far away and left her on the side of the dirt road. Before turning his back on her for the last time, he knelt and whispered to the child in a ragged breath:
"You should never have been born."
The next morning, a merchant on his way to a nearby town found the girl in a small basket, wrapped in thin blankets. He immediately picked up the basket off the ground, turned around, and brought her back to his village.
The merchant's wife reacted in shock and shed tears at the sight of the abandoned child. Having no children of their own, the merchant and his wife decided to raise the girl under their care.
"You're sure about this, now," the merchant asked.
"Look at her!" his wife replied. "Abandoned on the side of a road in the middle of the night. She needs our care."
The merchant sighed deeply, but he knew that he wanted to keep the child as well and failed to hide his grin.
"She'll need a name first," he said.
His wife smiled back and told him the girl's new name:
"Aversa."