Yin-Yin

For Yin-Yin, life had been a series of vignettes rather than a continuous narrative. She was born and raised alongside a whole gaggle of siblings—no, half-siblings—in a house as big as she had ever known, and had never wanted for anything. She was happy, for the most part, though toward the end of her comparatively short life the happiness slipped away as surely as her life force did with the onset of the disease. As the months dragged on, polite concern gave way to brutal reality. Keeping her around was a reminder of bad luck, she heard one of her father's wives hiss. Better to let her go ...