You are a child, all skin and bones wrapped in dirty rags which are meant to pass as clothing. The streets are your home, dingy alleys and damp sewers where you find refuge, where there is no one to mock you, no one to lament your existence and beat you until your skin is flayed from your body. Yet, inevitably, you always return to her, because she's your mother, and you love her, even if she loathes you. This is one time of many, and dawn is just approaching as you crawl out between the iron bars, skinny enough to fit, coated in grime and slick with murky water. The rags cling to your frail form, and the mask covering your face itches, the skin beneath it a mess of raw, burning pain, but you don't cry, don't make a sound. It is nothing to you now, the pain you are forced to live with on a daily basis.
The streets are bustling with people in clean clothes, the clip-clop of horses and the whine of carriages mingling with various layers of conversation. You avoid them, opting for narrow alleys and paths your small feet have weathered multiple times in the past. They are your secrets, these trails, and they all lead you one place: home. You don't think of it as such, exactly, but it is familiar, and you know little else.
You climb through a window when you reach the tiny, cramped building, skinny and stuck between rows of others, leaving behind a wet trail as you crawl along on all fours like some sort of animal. She is in the kitchen, your mother, stirring a foul-smelling pot over the fire, and you crouch in the doorway as you wait for her to notice you. In time she does, and her expression contorts into a hateful, twisted sneer. "You," she spits, in heavily accented French, and you wince, your skin still so thin, even after all this time. "Come crawling back again, have you? Come here, then, mom petit monstre, and have something to eat."
The loathing sets her eyes aflame, and yet you venture forward, craving something, anything, though the welts that line your back should have taught you better. Closer, closer still, and you see her smile, a curved slash of crazed triumph, just before the pot tips and you're blinded by agony. You're on fire, or it feels like you are, and you scream, tearing at your mask with skinny fingers as you writhe on the floor, desperately seeking to lessen your torment. Your mother stands over you and flings insults, yelling, proclaiming you hellspawn and monster and damning you to hell, but what she doesn't understand is that you're already there. You don't need to die to go to hell; you secured yourself a place the day you were born.