Previous post
A quote: “May we think of freedom, not as the right to do as we please, but as the opportunity to do what is right.” ~~ Peter Marshall
I’ll start with a story …
***************************
I can’t be tired. But day-to-day in The City is struggle – against noise and bureaucracy. I have to use the bus, so I’m hyper-alert when I ride, putting Katherine next to the window so my body shields her from the aisle.
Today our route was changed, no notice, the driver in his cubicle shrugs when a few of us shout “hey, you’re going the wrong way!”
In the distance, down the canyon formed by cheek-to-jowl buildings is Center City. Unlike our crumbling cement facades, you can see the afternoon sun glitter on glass spires reaching into the sky.
Katherine gasps and I turn as the bus drives by a park, an open square of struggling greenery with brightly colored playground equipment at its center. She looks up at me with hopeful eyes. I shake my head slowly. I remember the hoopla when the equipment was installed, The Center leaders showing up, photographers in tow.
Blah blah blah. A few kids for photo-ops then later, the gangs returned. The Center knows. It’s like the unannounced bus changes. Just enough chaos to keep us under control.
I hear Katherine’s sigh. I know what it costs me to stay here.
Gotta change that.
****************************
Now, it’s your turn.
.
.
.
.
.
. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Three hundred light-years, and who’s the first person from home I find on the schoolyard but Roddy the Bully. He was two years older and a head taller than me, and unlike the bullies in all the after-school specials and Very Special Episodes, he had this talent for switching from mean and nasty to smooth as a used-car salesman the minute an adult came around. So of course the teachers all thought we were the bad guys and sent us off to detention and made us write lines, while he goes smirking along.
I held back, hoping that maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t recognize me, maybe wouldn’t even notice me. I had no doubt of what had happen if he took a renewed interest in me — the same old pains, and the same old useless platitudes from all the adults. “Just ignore him” — as if he’d let me. And all those snappy comebacks that were supposed to knock him dead? Fell flat on their faces the minute they were coming out of my mouth.
I scanned the area, looking for any escape route, any way to get away from him. And then I realized what it meant to no longer be on Earth, no longer in a purely human polity. The Kitties are predators, and they expect a certain amount of play-fighting among their kittens. With the playground monitors being members of one or another of the other species in their Empire, could I finally give Roddy the good sock to the mouth he deserves?
Not like I expect him to suddenly turn into a friend like in some of those particularly glurgy Very Special Episodes, but if he’ll just leave me alone, I’ll be happy.
1 Comment