Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing AmericaSills, Steven David Justin
General
Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America
Sills, Steven David Justin
Fiction
Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent
as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and
learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed
the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes!
Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable.
How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She
could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the
spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion
toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the
concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed
atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the
youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually
reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele
was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally
did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit
accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and
the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the
worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of
ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were
really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents
caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four
misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele
did not feel much misanthropy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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