The fourth birthday

Ortrud was completely torn, she didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She had her whole family together for the first time. It was Sören's fourth birthday, the day on which everything was to change. The four of them, father Heinrich, mother Ortrud, sister Sonja and Sören, sat around the birthday table and Sören was allowed to blow out the four candles on the cake. Ortrud was overjoyed, as from now on the children would stay with them forever. The time of separation was over. But just an hour later, work called again and the first birthday party in four years was already over, because the next day was Friday, which is the main sales day in a fish store. That's when things are really buzzing. However, most of the things that were to be sold were not yet ready.

The siblings had never met before and were on their own that afternoon. They explored this new environment together. The most exciting part was the carp tank, where four big, fat carp swam around in circles. The scariest thing was a kind of aquarium in which crawling animals with pincer-like hands lived. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. There were dead fish lying around everywhere in metal tubs, half covered in ice. But the real eye-catcher was a large iron door with a huge lever as a handle. Behind it lay frozen, whole fish with their mouths torn open, dead milky eyes, and lots of blocks of ice that were almost bigger than Sören, but totally clear so that you could see through them, and in which Sören's sister, with her distorted face, was unrecognizable. The children were still making lots of faces and didn't know whether to be scared or amused. But then Ortrud came running around the cornerand strictly forbade them from ever entering the room again. The door could only be opened from the outside and people had frozen to death in a room like this before because they couldn't get out.

Many more things that were forbidden were to follow later.

Ortrud watched the goings-on with great skepticism, as there were too many dangerous objects, such as knives that were extra sharp and forks that were extra pointy. It was exactly what she was always afraid of, namely not being able to fulfill her duty of supervising the children because customers needed her attention. That wasn't the only reason why they had put the children in a home. The place was also extra cold, extra wet and extra dark. Now, four years after Sören's birth, the children were already out of the woods and no longer so susceptible to illness.

Or were they?

This environment literally cried out for injuries, pneumonia and blood poisoning. Just as the store was full to bursting, the two discovered the door to the private area, and Sonja was already tall and strong enough to open it. And they were already out of her mother's sight. Had Ortrud really cleared away everything that could be dangerous? Just behind the door, the two of them discovered a tiny hallway from which a simple, small toilet, one square meter in size and with a