Mercy by KC Decker

Ironically, my name is Mercy, though my parents showed me none. If you buy the nonsense they’re selling, you’d think my very birth foretold of an evil prophesy and unleashed a wicked scourge across the land.
While that telling is all very dramatic and compelling, it’s not the whole story. The truth is, I was almost ten years old before the religious cult began to insist I had been kissed by the devil.
Nowadays, how people perceive me is clouded by a different set of convictions and a whole new doctrine. It’s a different batch of Kool-Aid, but I still have no choice about whether to swallow it or not. Not while I’m here and labeled a Ward of the State.
I’ve worn all types of labels over the years—non-believer, pariah, deranged, orphan…it’s all in my file if you care to understand me better. But the label that seems to have implanted the deepest and garnered the most attention is the one I wear like a Scarlet Letter. It precedes me when I enter a room and is whispered about like a schoolyard crush.
Paranoid Schizophrenic.