Jesse

I left the round wooden breakfast table and went upstairs and down the narrow carpeted hall to Louisa and Amanda's room where I knocked on the wooden door.

"Louisa?" I asked: "ok I come in?"

There wasn't an answer.

I turned the knob and opened the door. My daughter was sitting on her thin narrow bed the covers pulled up to her waist.

"I don't want to Dad," she told me.

She looked tired.

"Do what, honey?" I asked, approaching her bed.

"This."

She took her bare arms out from under the covers. On them were cuts.

"Katie's sick...she's losing more and weight...so's Mandy. Mom's...we don't know. And now Anna's sick. I need something to take it all away."

"Oh honey," I sat on her bed.

I examined her arms for any sign of infection. There wasn't any.

"How long?" I asked.

Downstairs, I heard my daughters, Evan, Rebecca, Jennifer and Mark talking.

"Since last year, when Mandy first got sick."

"Do you have-"

I noticed a thin small white container of Neosporin on the bedside table between the 2 beds.

"What?" my daughter asked.

"Nothing, never mind."

"No, really. What?"

"Neosporin."

"Um yeah it's right-" she followed my gaze: "oh."

"I don't want my whole world to disappear. Like Mandy. And Kate," she said.

They'd lost weight therefore disappearing.