12 Kilos, This Dungeon Earth
“My daddy used to pour that same vanilla over apples with brown sugar, he called it candied apples. Thought I wouldn’t remember what the real thing was. I knew. I remembered. He always had bad news when he did it. I’m betting you ain’t any different now.”
In a couple of sentences using her simple, to the point dialect, the ancient woman eliminated Garrett’s subtle way of introducing the bargaining phase of their new relationship.
“Everyone you have ever known, me included, and everyone you will ever know until the day you die, they will all want or expect something from you. Not just from you, but every other person they ever meet or grow to know as well. Every connection to another human being will be a miserable intrigue of what, where, and why, a red line on a board that measures wins and losses only, and those who choose animals over other people will find themselves even deeper down in the world of dog eat dog. You had best believe that simple truth or be in constant peril of your own hideous heart.”
Garrett was eleven when his aunt sat him down and spoke to him like an adult for the first time. It was nearly a year after the incident in the barn, nearly a year after Garrett made the internal shift from being a sad, bewildered boy into a melancholy and sullen youth. His aunt’s speech lit a fire within him, not a realization of some formerly hidden reality but a fire of rebellion. All be it, a brief one.
The world can’t possibly be as cut throat as all that. His father had never loved him, much less liked him, the villagers routinely hated and bullied him, every person and most of the animals Garrett had ever known were indifferent to him at best, and yet, the world just couldn’t be so easily categorized along the lines of who feeds on who.
Garrett’s aunt seemed fully prepared for his tiny rebellion when he finally returned to her library, his golden summer of trying his best to be everything to everyone just to prove her wrong. When he came back, thoroughly defeated, and despondent she didn’t waste anytime gloating.
“I told you those things because they were the truth, not my truth, just the truth. Learning how this world really works is awful, none of us take to it kindly or well, not unless there is something sick and wrong inside of us. We realize how this world works like we learn that the oxygen that we breath is a poison meant to degrade and destroy our every organ and tissue slowly but inevitably. The old-world philosophies called it ying and yang, give and take. I call it the largest and ugliest con, the one we all get to witness and the one none of us can do anything about.”