Mother’s Day

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“You must be a mother,” the man said. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Ellie smiled politely. She was used to complete strangers approaching her and wanting to see her baby. It was hard to say what might motivate that sort of behavior in people – somehow, you just seemed to become more approachable when you were wheeling around a stroller. It was certainly not what she’d expected. Her husband, Mark, had always complained that parents had eyed him suspiciously when he’d show any interest towards their children, as if they feared that any man who spoke to a child must be trying to harm them. Ellie had found very little reason to be suspicious of people, and was more annoyed by the attention than paranoid about their intentions.

“How old is your baby?” the man asked.

“About a month old,” she said, and began wheeling her stroller through the parking lot towards the Target store entrance. The man walked along beside them, though not close enough that Ellie was concerned. He was a large man with short brown hair, wearing dress slacks, a plaid shirt and thick plastic glasses. He wore a smile that seemed to be a regular feature on his face. By all appearances, he seemed rather harmless.

“I’ll bet you’re ready for her to sleep through the night,” the man said, and laughed.

Ellie laughed too, out of politeness. “Oh, yeah,” she intoned. “I used to think I know what it meant to be tired. And then we had a baby.”

They were approaching the entrance now, and the man began walking faster. “Enjoy your day,” he said, and vanished into the store.

Ellie went about her business, too, picking up a desperately-needed nursing bra and some snacks. She crossed paths with the man twice, both times making polite eye contact and offering a nod. By the time she was done and on her way to the register, she saw him again, this time speaking to another woman with a stroller.

“You must be a mother,” he was saying to her. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Ellie wasn’t certain why it bothered her so much for the man to be saying that to another woman who was obviously a mother. But as she passed by and made her way to the checkout lane, she felt a twinge of disappointment building within her, like this odd interaction should have been hers and hers alone.

“Are you having a Happy Mother’s Day?” the cashier asked her as she checked out.

“I suppose so,” said Ellie. And she wanted to add, but I wish I didn’t have to share it.

Paralysis

Photo Credit: Patrick Q (Flickr.com) Used Under Creative Commons License.

He made his way over to the cookie aisle, walking as quickly as he could around the store’s layout. It never made sense to him that grocery stores worked so hard to route you through the produce aisle and by the deli before you go to anything else. Surely if you needed produce or deli items, you’d make a beeline for them. Putting the good stuff in the middle of the store — that had to lose customers.

He reached the cookie aisle, and started searching for the brand he normally bought. It took a minute, but he found them.

$3.59 was the price.

I’m not spending that much, he thought, and started to look at the other choices around him. There were dozens of items to choose from, spanning a space of least 20 feet of shelving. Nothing was priced around his range, and he decided not to worry so much about price.

It was as if he’d knocked over a dam. The number of choices available to him flooded into his mind now, and he found himself pacing up and down the aisle, unsure of what to do. Everything sounded viable; anything would do. But now, he was afraid about what he might give up to get another alternative. He considered the chocolate cookies, but wasn’t sure chocolate was the flavor he wanted; the ginger snaps sounded good, but they weren’t exactly his favorite. He went on like that, unable to make a decision. His brain felt like it was getting soggy now.

Finally, he realized he was going to miss his bus. He grabbed a pack of fudge-coated animal crackers and decided to make a beeline for the beverages so he could get his cream soda. Twice, he turned back to see if he could make a better choice than the animal crackers, but both times, he turned himself around and pushed forward. He grabbed his soda and ignored the impulse racks next to the U-Scan lane. He knew he just had to get out of here. But his mind kept pressing him to consider other alternatives. It was as if he couldn’t commit to the decision.

So, he opened the bag as soon as he scanned it, grabbed out a handful of animal cookies, and jammed them into his mouth to chew on while he paid.

The waters in his mind seemed to recede, and he realized he was all right with the choice he’d made.

And as he slid his credit card through the reader, chewing away on the almost waxy fudge of the animal crackers, he marveled that he’d managed to even make a decision with so many choices to sort through.

Frozen

Photo Credit: Lisa Norwood (Flickr.com) Used Under Creative Commons License.

“So go then,” she said, not even bothering to look up from her book. “The dishes will be here for you when you get back.”

“Can’t you do them, just tonight?” asked Joe.

“You know the rules,” she said. “I cook, you clean.”

He sighed as he tightened up the laces on his running shoes. “I’ll be too tired when I get back,” he said.

“Then I’d suggest you work your lower body tonight so your arms will be up to the task,” she said. “No excuses.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, and stood up. “Gotta run.”

“Hah hah,” she said. “Are you going to be warm enough? The temperature’s in the low teens.”

“I’ll be fine, once I get moving,” he said. “It’s just a few blocks, anyway.”

“Mmhmm,” she said, and reached over towards the package of cookies sitting on the table beside her. “Watch out for ice.”

“There’s no ice out there,” he said. “It’s been too dry.”

Her fingers plucked a cookie shaped like an elf from the package. “Just be careful.”

“I will,” he said. He kissed her on the forehead as she ate, patted her pregnant belly to say goodbye to the baby, and headed out the door.

It was cold outside, but not windy. That was fine. Joe walked quickly, stretching his arms as he strode, and then started practicing some karate punches. It was a good way to warm up, both in terms of getting himself ready to run and in terms of keeping his actual body temperature up. Plus, it would keep anyone passing by from messing with him. Not that mugging was a problem in a neighborhood two blocks from the police station, but hey. Joe liked to think he looked tough enough – or crazy enough – that he wasn’t worth the trouble.

A n SUV drove by, headlights a little brighter than they probably should have been, and Joe found himself looking down and away, slightly blinded, but keeping up those karate punches with his right hand. He switched to his left hand after number thirty, keeping his right up to guard, and working some jabs. As his eyes traveled back upwards, he saw something lying in the gutter up ahead – a black mass of something, with what looked like a bright orange extension cord or bike chain or something wrapped around it.

Joe kept walking, working his left arm, and found himself wondering what, exactly, he was seeing. As he got a little bit closer, he could see that it was a black cat, just lying there, with that weird cord wrapped around it. He was moving pretty briskly, and didn’t think much of it. Why would someone wrap a cord around a cat? he wondered as he passed by. The cat’s body faded in his peripheral vision, and he switched to alternating uppercuts as he crossed the street. Did someone strange it with the cord and then throw it out of the car?

As he reached the other side of the street, he could see the gym up ahead. But suddenly, he found himself looking back. What if it’s alive? he wondered. Should I do something? He dropped his hands to his side, and stood there, looking at the cat’s body. It was very still. He looked both ways to make sure the street was clear and started to cross back over a little more slowly.

The cat was definitely not moving, and he scanned it for any telltale sign that it might be alive. As he got closer, he could see some frost that had settled in its fur. He thought about reaching down to touch it, to see if perhaps it was just lying still to conserve energy. He wondered if perhaps unwrapping that cord would make it spring to life.

And then, as he stood next to the gutter and examined the cat more closely, he realized why it was wrapped in an orange cord. Its entrails had come out of its body and frozen in the chill night air. The cat had clearly been hit by a car, and its gut had ruptured. Someone had clearly moved it to the gutter to die.

Joe forgot about being cold. He forgot about everything. He just stood there, looking down at the cat, a million thoughts flashing through his mind, a sort of paralysis overtaking him and keeping him rooted there, horrified at what he was seeing.

Blank Canvas

Photo Credit: Trina Baker (Flickr.com)

The canvas was blank.

The artist stared at his hand.

It wasn’t that he was looking for inspiration – after all, he knew exactly what it was that he wanted to paint. The problem wasn’t in the idea.

It was in finding the right place to start.

His eyes followed the lines on the inside of his palm. It was like looking at a river on a map – he could trace each line, and see it branch out into tributaries, streams and creeks. He could see the delta up near his index finger, and the stronger, deeper, more powerful line it formed. He wondered which way the water would flow on his hand – towards his thumb, or towards the outer edge of his palm.

He thought about spitting on his hand, just to see how the liquid would flow, but no—that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking; just staring.

He turned his vision to a small piece of calloused skin that had turned white and flaky. Underneath it, his hand was smooth, free of the wrinkles and creases he could see elsewhere. The hard skin on the top wore its ridges much more deeply than the skin around it. It was as if the top layer removed all signs of age as it came off his skin; the bottom layer was fresh and new, wrinkle-free and able to be molded into something new. He wondered if the texture of the paintbrush would start to shape it. Perhaps his hand would take on the smooth polish of the wood. Perhaps it would even start to feel smooth, like the wood, and give the brush a point on his hand on which he might lose control. That would be unfortunate. He could see himself now, painting and slipping just a bit. A slip of the brush could cost him hours of work if it was too severe.

He sighed and turned his hand over. The purpose of this exercise was to put the mind in a creative place, not to stifle his creative energy with thoughts of failure. The back of his hand – now that was an interesting place, far more worthy of creative consideration. He flexed his fingers, watching the muscles of his knuckle push up the mountainous bones that controlled his fingers, along with the skeletal structures under the skin that seemed to pop up. His gaze went deeper into the flesh, admiring the individual craters that made up the surface of the skin. Some of them had fine blond hairs sticking out, but most didn’t seem to have any hair at all. He wondered if the craters were supposed to be hair follicles, or if they were just tiny dimples in the skin.

He’d heard, once, that the reason human fingers were so dexterous was because they had tiny, eye-like sensory organs in their tips. They weren’t eyes in the conventional sense, but more like sensors that could see with a sort of blind sight – aware of things, but not conscious of them.

He stretched his fingers up under his eyes and studied them carefully. The light overhead gleamed off their tips. One would think, if there were any eyes on the fingers, you would be able to see them wincing in that light. He turned his gaze slight away from his fingers, but watched them in his peripheral vision, waiting to see if he could detect some sort of motion – some sign of eyes opening and closing. He waited, watching, and thought, for a moment, that perhaps he’d seen something. But he realized it was more likely a trick of the light, or an error of his eye.

His eye flitted to the canvas in front of him, and suddenly, he knew exactly where to begin. The entire plan seemed to appear on the canvas in front of him, almost like a paint-by numbers picture stacked upon other layers.

He picked up his brush, and he began to paint.

Wardens

Photo credit: Hellgasms! (Flickr.com)

“I don’t know what to do,” Mark confessed. “I’ve tried everything.”

Elly sat silently, the pancake makeup on her face glistening in the bright lights of the living room. Her expression was dull, probably the result of the pot she had reeked of when she’d climbed in her window. It wasn’t the first night Mark and Rhea had caught her sneaking out of her room to go out partying in parts unknown. But it was the first time they’d decided to greet her as she returned from her misadventures.

But Elly didn’t seem to care, and as she sat in her chair — the same chair Mark had built for her in his shop, with the little heart carved into the top and the pink trim he’d painted on himself — she almost seemed to be biding her time, waiting for her parents to release her so she could go to bed blissfully unrepentent.

“I have some ideas,” said Rhea. She paced around the room angrily as she ticked off her options on her fingers. “I’m calling tomorrow and getting an alarm system installed that will go off if any door or window gets opened. I’m also going to have them put cameras outside so I can see everyone who comes and goes from this house at any hour. And I’m taking a picture of that…” she spat the word, “…boy that we found in your room down last week to the school principal to find out who he is, and then, I’m going to the police to file charges.”

Elly rolled her eyes, but said nothing.

“And if you thought you were miserable before being grounded,” Rhea laughed now. “Ho, ho, missy, you’re going to love your new life, because I’m going to pick you up from school every afternoon and make you go sit down at the office with me until I’m done working. And then, you’re coming straight home, and sitting out where we can see you until we go to bed. No more shutting yourself up here in your room, no more hiding out in the car, no more trips down to the basement. When we look up, we’ll see you, and if we don’t, we’ll make sure you’re back in our sight before you can count to ten. You’ll be lucky if I let you close the door when you go to the bathroom.”

Mark listened to his wife ramble on, and sunk into the mattress on his daughter’s bed for a moment. He remembered when they’d taken her to the store and picked out this bed together, when she’d turned twelve. It had been a big deal to her, to graduate from the little twin bed she’d had since she was three years old to a double bed where she could keep all of her stuffed animals. That had just been four years ago. It was amazing to think that the little girl who had seemed so immature and innocent was now sneaking out and doing all sorts of things Mark had never dreamed she’d do.

“Well? Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Rhea demanded. Mark sat up, and looked at his daughter.

“I’ve got Saturday detention in the morning,” Elly said. “Let me go to bed.”

Rhea turned to Mark. “She doesn’t even care!” she said. “Say something to her!” Her eyes were pleading: Tell her how dangerous the world really is, or how girls who sneak out and do drugs wind up dead, or how sex with men she barely knows can give her an STD or get her pregnant. Tell her something to make her straighten up and be our little girl again.

Mark knew that none of that would matter. And so he stood up, looked at his wife sadly, and said, in a quiet voice, “You both go to bed.” He walked over to the chair where Elly was sitting, and touched her on the shoulder. “Go clean up.”

Elly stood up. “I’ve got to go wash my face,” she said, and walked out towards the bathroom.

Rhea looked at him with wide eyes. “What was that?” she demanded. “Are you just going to give up on her?”

“No,” Mark said. He stroked the chair he’d made, his fingers running along the heart in the frame. “I’m going to sit here, and make sure that she doesn’t try to leave again. And tomorrow, we’ll get that alarm appointment scheduled. Everything you said was right.”

“But what do we do?” Rhea asked. “She can’t go on like this. She’s going to get in real trouble, Mark, and we’re not going to be able to help her.”

Mark nodded as he sat down. “I know,” he said. “But we’ve done everything we can do for her. She’s made us in to wardens. And wardens don’t scream or yell. They just make sure the sentence is served and that the prisoners don’t kill each other.”

“You make it sound like we should just let her go do whatever she wants,” Rhea said.

“No,” said Mark. “I’m just saying that the more resents us, the less effective we are. There’s got to be a better way.”

“Whatever, Mark,” Rhea said. “I’m going to bed.”

Elly eventually settled back into the room, wearing a tight t-shirt and pajama shorts with the word, “juicy” written on the back. He didn’t realize she owned those, but he’d make sure she didn’t get any more like them. She shot her father a look of contempt, settled into bed, and turned away from him as she turned out the light above her bed.

And Mark sat, and watched his daughter angrily drift off into sleep, and thought about a solution to the problem — a way for their family to be whole once more. A way that would work.

But by the time the sun rose, he still found himself without an answer.

Car Repair

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“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” confessed Chris. He pulled his head out from underneath the car’s hood. “I mean, I have some ideas, but I don’t really know enough about cars to say.”

The car had been lost power during his commute, and he’d barely gotten it home. It was a weird problem — the battery seemed to have no problems at low speeds, but completely went out during high speeds. If he was driving locally, the car was fine. If he was on the highway, the dashboard would go out, the air would turn off, and the car would have trouble accelerating.

“Well, take it to a mechanic,” said Alice.

“I can’t afford it,” said Chris. “I just had to replace my starter last month.”

“Charge it, then,” she said. “You’ve got to have a car. It’s not like you can get to work without one.”

She was right about that. But Chris was reluctant to tell her that his credit cards were already maxed, and that he was already worried he might have to declare bankruptcy if, God forbid, he lost his job. It wasn’t that Chris was bad with money, per se – it was just that he hadn’t slowed his spending down quickly enough, when he’d been cut back to a part-time position, and he hadn’t considered how quickly his credit card balances would shoot up.

So, he was in a precarious position now. He’d hoped it would be something simple that he could fix himself. But as he stared at the engine, schematics in hand, he realized that he had no idea of how to fix the blasted thing. He’d had to make a few repairs in the past, but they’d always been very minor things. This problem was far out of his realm of repair consciousness.

He cursed. “I hate feeling like this,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Alice.

“Helpless. Incompetent. Stupid,” he said. “Car repair seems like one of those basic skills everyone should have to learn. Why don’t they teach this stuff in high school?”

“They do, I think,” said Alice. “I mean, I think they did at my school, anyway.”

“Well, not at mine, and if they did, I didn’t take it,” fumed Chris. “It should have been a required class. Why don’t they make you learn stuff you actually need to know instead of stuff you don’t even care about?”

“That makes sense,” said Alice, her smile slightly wry. “Your car breaks down, and so of course it’s the educational system’s fault and not yours.”

“Don’t get all defensive,” Chris said. “Just because you’re a teacher doesn’t mean you know what’s best.”

Now Alice’s smile dropped into a dangerous frown. “I know a hell of a lot more about education than you do,” she said. “I’ve got a master’s degree. You never even finished college.”

“Right, let’s just bring that back up,” said Chris. He slammed his screwdriver down on the ground in anger. “Chris is a failure. He can’t finish anything he starts.”

“I never said that!” shouted Alice. “I never said that. All I said was that you need to finish one day.”

“Once again, because you think you know better than me!” Chris fired back. He yanked the car hood down now and stepped towards her. “If you think I’m such a failure, you fix the car!”

“Fix your own car!” Alice said. “At least I can afford to keep mine running! Maybe if you’d go get a job that didn’t require a nametag, you’d be able to keep your bills paid.”

Chris felt like he’d been sucker-punched. “That was low,” he said quietly. “You know it’s been a rough year.”

“And yet somehow, I’ve managed!” shouted Alice. “They’re cutting jobs left and right in my field, but I’ve held on!”

Chris stormed inside the house as she said it, leaving her out in the garage. She didn’t follow him in, and he assumed she’d gone home when he looked out the window a few minutes later and saw that her car was no longer there.

He felt boiled over, with no ambition to do anything but sit in front of the TV and fume. The car wasn’t getting fixed today. That much he knew. But the whole experience had been a reminder that he had plenty of other things in his life that were broken as well.

Weight Loss

Photo Credit: Mike Baird (Flickr.com)

George let out a heavy sigh as he stared as his naked body in the mirror. From the front, it looked find. But when he started to turn even slightly to the side, it became clear that his figure wasn’t as flat as he wanted to believe.

“When did this happen?” he asked his wife, Elli, who was busy showering behind him. “I was thin when we got married, wasn’t I?”

“That was ten years ago, George,” Elli said, her voice raised slightly to cut through the noise of the falling water. “You were a lot more active then.”

“I don’t think I was,” said George. “The kids and the dogs wear me out. I think I’m probably more active now than I was then.”

“Well, it’s your metabolism, then,” Elli called. “I don’t know. Maybe if you’d quit eating hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch every day, you’d be better off. Or lay off the beer when you get home.”

“I don’t know,” said George. “I’m skeptical that it has much to do with my diet.”

It took Elli a moment to respond — it sounded like she was in the midst of washing her hair – and George turned to the other side, and clutched his gut. It wasn’t huge, and it didn’t even really feel like fat. He could feel his ribcage underneath his slightly sagging breasts.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Elli said. “Either eat less or exercise more. It’s up to you.”

“I don’t know,” said George. He released his gut, and watched it jiggle. “I guess I could start eating more salad.”

“That’s probably a good start,” said his wife.

George started to dress. “It’s just… I don’t know,” he said. “You cover salad in meat and dressing and cheese, and you might as well just be eating a pizza, you know?”

“Then why don’t you use our gym membership?” Elli asked. “We’re paying for you to go, and you never use it.”

“I hate the gym,” George said. “It just doesn’t seem natural to me.”

Elli turned off the shower and pulled a towel behind the curtain. “You look fine, George,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind if you lost a little weight, but really, when you’re dressed, you look fine. Don’t be so self-conscious about it.”

George didn’t believe a word of it, of course. Elli cared. She had to. She just didn’t want to get into an argument and was trying to end the conversation. George knew full well that she’d complained about his weight to one of her friends.

“There’s got to be a better way,” he mused. “But what is it? Why is it so hard for us, with everything we can do with technology today, to lose weight?”

Elli didn’t have an answer. And George realized, as he buttoned up his shirt, that he didn’t either.

The New Game

Photo Credit: Duane Brown (Flickr.com)

“I don’t understand it at all,” said Joseph. “I’ve been developing video games for years, and this just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Well, the problem is that you see video games as being structured in a traditional way,” said Amir. “You expect to see them on a disc, or in a cartridge, packaged for sale and put on a store shelf, or available to buy online somewhere. You expect them to come with a manual, or to teach you how to play, and you expect them to have some sort of goal at the end.”

“Yeah, that pretty much sounds exactly like a video game to me,” confessed Joseph. “At least, one you plan to make money off of.”

“Well, we’ve figured out another way,” said Amir. “One that circumvents all of that. One that gets right to the heart of why people are playing.”

“Fun?” suggested Joseph.

Amir smiled in an almost patronizing fashion. Joseph had been his teacher, once. The irony of the situation was amusing. The fact that they were having lunch at an expensive bistro instead of a quick service stop, all at Amir’s expense, was a testament to the difference between the results of their two philosophies.

“Fun has nothing to do with it,” said Amir. “Video games are rarely fun for long.”

“I disagree,” said Joseph. “If a game stops being fun at some fundamental level, the player will move on to something else. You know that.”

Amir shook his head dismissively. “Fun is what gets the player in the door,” he said. “That’s all. Once the player has been engaged, once the experience has started out fun, a game becomes about work. It stops being about fun, and it becomes something far more important.”

“Achievement?” Joseph asked.

“Progression,” said Amir. “The player must move towards some objective, no matter how arbitrary or difficult it is.”

“True, but you have to reward the player, eventually,” said Joseph. “If the game’s impossible, they’ll stop playing.”

Amir smiled at this. “Really?” he asked.”Do you truly believe that?”

“I can’t not believe it,” said Joseph. “It’ s a fundamental of game design.”

“It’s a fallacy,” said Amir. “What keeps the player engaged is not whether or not the goal can be achieved, but whether or not he or she becomes frustrated in achieving it. A goal can be across an endless chasm, impossible to reach, but so long as the player believes that the chasm can be crossed, somehow, and the game leads the player to believe that wholeheartedly, he or she will search for a way.”

“So, that’s the secret to CastleTown, then?” asked Joseph. “People love it because it can’t be won?”

“Precisely,” said Amir with a smile.

Joseph shook his head. “That shouldn’t work,” he said.

“I agree, with a conventional game,” said Amir. “But CastleTown has something other games lack.”

“Oh?” said Joseph. “Enlighten me.”

“Social repercussions,” said Amir. “If you stop playing CastleTown, your peasants will leave and your castle will erode. But your friends who are playing need your Castle to exist. They can allocate a small portion of their resources to keep your Castle intact. And because you are costing them something in the game, they are likely to convince you to come back and continue playing.”

“Well, sure, but what if you just tell them, ‘no?’” Joseph asked. “They’ll quit too, eventually, right?”

Amir shook his head. “You think of the gamer as a solitary, lonely person looking out for his own interests,” he said. “That has been the paradigm of the last thirty years. But the truth is that gamers are people. They want to please other people. It is far easier for them to keep playing and to help their friends work towards that next achievement than it is to leave their friends crippled in the game world. We have data that shows that 90% of gamers will return to the game if a friend asks them to do so.”

Joseph’s eyes widened. “That’s just… sort of evil,” he said. “You’re preying upon peoples’ desire to be liked so they’ll play your game.”

Amir smiled broadly. “We give the game away for free, and we offer the players the opportunity to take shortcuts for a small fee,” he said. “We sell small items to make the gamers stand out amongst their peers, and we host contests that they can pay to enter to win special items they would not be able to earn otherwise. None of this costs us a penny, you understand — whatever we can create for the game, the players want. The quality of the game, the richness of the experience, the power of the graphics — none of those things are important to us. We developed CastleTown in a month and had over 20,000 users in a single day, each of them recruiting their friends to join.”

“And all in the pursuit of an impossible goal,” mused Joseph. “What is the goal, by the way?”

Amir leaned forward. “Whatever the player perceives it to be,” he said quietly.

Joseph felt a chill roll down his back. Amir had stumbled upon something here, something powerful and raw and important where human nature was concerned. And Joseph could not help feeling that it would one day be looked upon as the beginning of a dark era for humanity — a new manipulation, subtle and seemingly harmless, but able to direct large groups of people to give up large sums of money without ever realizing what was happening to them.

The Dark Ages

Photo Credit: Paul Goyette (Flickr.cm)

“But why would they do that?” Clern asked his tutor in shock.

“Because they were living in the dark ages of humanity,” said Mane. “Some of the people were scientific and embraced reason, but most were simply content to live out their biological urges.”

Clern looked down at his pet dog, Yoseh, and gave him a pat on the head. This ancient history stuff was troubling. To think that humans could have lived that way… it was horrifying!

“What you have to understand, my boy, is that human beings couldn’t even treat each other as equals,” Mane continued. “There was this practice during the time that they called abortion. When a woman would become pregnant with a fetus, she would sometimes carry it for a month or two without realizing it and then go and have a doctor rip it out of her or kill it with chemicals if she decided she didn’t want it any longer. It was a barbaric practice, and the sad thing is that the entire issue divided humanity along a very bewildering line — they would argue whether the fetus was alive or dead. Can you imagine?”

“They… didn’t know?” Clern asked.

“They didn’t think,” said Mane. “Even then, they had the technology to resolve the issue. Abortion as a practice could have ended entirely had they instituted a breeding program that would have allowed those who wanted to be life-bearers to do so and those who did not to indulge in their carnal pleasures with no repercussions. But they were so distracted by the debate of what life truly was that they could not see the practical solution. Nor could they let go of their age-old attitudes towards sexual behavior.”

“Abortion is just one of the heinous things they did to each other, of course,” Mane continued. “During the height of the dark ages, technology was driven by instruments of death designed to kill other humans. Did you know, my boy, that the exoskeletons we use today to build great things and the robots we use to assist us with our daily needs were first developed as weapons to be used in wars? Wars resulted in death and suffering unlike anything you could ever fathom. All for pointless squabbles about power and resources.”

Clern shook his head. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How could humans possibly behave this way?”

“That’s why we call it the dark ages,” Mane continued. “Humans would kill each other over the color of another person’s skin, or another person’s ancestors, or another person’s nationality. Even worse, some nations would live in extreme wealth, while allowing others elsewhere in the world to starve. It was all needless and cruel.”

“Is that why they slaughtered the animals, too?” asked Clern. “Because they were cruel?”

“They slaughtered the animals for food, my boy,” said Mane. Clern tensed up and put his hand on Yoseh, who also looked up in alarm as he sensed Clern’s discomfort. “Familiar animals, such as cows and chickens and sheep and fish. But even unfamiliar animals that no longer exist, like sharks and ostriches and elk.”

“And dogs?” Clern asked.

“Of course,” Mane nodded. “They would eat any meat they could get their hands on. And what they couldn’t eat, they would often waste, erecting huge mounds of trash outside their cities. You’ve learned about those, have you not?”

Clern nodded. “But why?” he asked.

“Because they believed that the animals were inferior to them,” Mane said. “Many humans at the time believed that they had been created by a god to rule the world over the animals. When scientific knowledge began to flourish and revealed the truth about human origins, many humans refused to believe it. Others argued that since the law of nature was survival of the fittest, that humans should be able to eat any animal they could catch and kill.”

“But… that’s twisted!” Clern cried.

“That may be,” said Mane. “To some degree, you have to excuse them, because they were correct in that humans evolved larger brains because they were capable of eating meat. Proteins are important for human survival, and the humans did not yet possess the technology for growing meat without taking the life of a thinking creature. But whereas early humans understood that nature was not a hierarchy as much as it was an ecosystem, dark age humans responded in arrogance, taking control of nature and shaping it to their desires. They destroyed a number of species before they truly realized what they were doing, but by then, it was too late.”

Clern put his head down on his desk. “I don’t want to learn any more about the dark ages,” he sighed. “It’s too much.”

Mane sighed. “Sadly, my boy, you must,” he said. “It is the history of our people, and we must understand it so that we do not live in fear or ignorance of where we have come from.”

“But,” Mane added, “that’s enough for today, I think.”

He rose, and looked out the window. “Our world is so bright, so gleaming, so peaceful…” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that this place had once been a city where humans had fought against each other because of two old religions.”

“What did they call this place?” Clern asked.

“Israel,” Mane said, and sighed. “And the story of what happened to the people who lived here will be our topic tomorrow.”

With that, Mane gave the boy a tired smile, a simple bow, and said, “you are dismissed.”

Vegetarian

Photo Credit: Lost Tulsa (Flickr.com)

“Come on, Betty,” said Roger. “Try some.”

He held up a fork with a piece of his steak on it, red and dripping with bloody juices. Betty moved her garden salad out of the way and gave him a sharp look.

“I know what steak tastes like,” she hissed. “Don’t shove it in my face.”

Roger shrugged and popped the fork in his mouth. He gave a contented sigh, smiled and sunk into his seat  a bit. “So good,” he moaned, and then picked up his knife, plunged his fork into the steak and eagerly began cutting another bite.

“I should have never let you talk me into eating here,” Betty said.

“Well, it’s your own fault you don’t eat meat,” Roger replied. “The rest of us don’t have to suffer.”

“You say it like I have a disease or something,” Betty said.

“It seems pretty sick to me, yeah,” he said, and then popped another piece into his mouth and began to chew. “Nature designed us to eat meat. What’s the big deal?”

Betty frowned. “I didn’t realize it was your turn to be the meat evangelist,” she said. “Was that the whole point in bringing me here? To throw all this in my face?”

Roger shook his head as he cut another piece. “Nope,” he said. “We came here because they serve a great steak, and steak was what I was craving. Simple as that.”

Betty decided to begin eating her salad, and the conversation lulled for a moment. Finally, she said, “I don’t think you realize what a temptation this is for me.”

“Oh?” Roger said. “You can have a bite. I won’t tell anyone.”

“No, it’s just that…” she sighed. “I used to love meat. If you’d have told me that I would become a vegetarian a couple of years ago, I would have told you that you were crazy. But the more I looked into it, the more I learned about what they do to those poor animals, the more I realized that I couldn’t keep eating meat unless I was willing to kill it myself. And you know, I wasn’t. So what other choice did I have?”

“Well, Jesus ate meat, so I think it’s OK,” said Roger. “Animals don’t have feelings like we do, you know.”

Betty sighed. “You say that, but I don’t think it’s true,” she said. “My cats definitely have feelings. So does your dog.”

“Well, kind of,” Roger said. “But that’s not really the same as, you know, cows and pigs and chickens. They’re not too bright.”

“Chickens aren’t,” said Betty. “Cows are pretty much all about eating. But pigs are smart. They’re one of the smartest types of animals there are.”

“Pigs? Really?” asked Roger. “Well, too bad. I’m not giving up bacon.”

“Not that it should matter how smart they are anyway,” said Betty. “We don’t eat animals because they’re smart. We eat them because we can grow them up to get really fat and then produce a bunch of unhealthy meat.  And then, we have so much meat that we wind up throwing a lot of it away, or using the by-products for all sorts of terrible things. It’s a horrible thing to do. We don’t show any respect to the animals, we torture them and butcher them, and then we package their pieces up so they don’t even look like animal parts anymore.”

Roger shrugged. “Yeah, but they wouldn’t even be around if we weren’t eating them,” he said. “We give them life so they can be food. The ecosystem can’t sustain them unless we’re out there feeding them and taking care of them.”

“Well, and that’s another problem,” Betty said. “Cattle farming is really bad for the environment. It puts a lot of methane gas into the air, it creates bad ecosystems where bacteria and viruses thrive, which means it can spread disease.”

Roger polished off his steak. “Yeah, well,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not giving up meat.”

“I know,” Betty said. And she went back to her salad.