Artwork by David Lewis
Free at Last!
© Peter Grehan 2020
When you’re a child you’re full of questions; how far away are the stars, why is the sky blue, the Sun yellow, where does snow come from? The questions I asked were mostly about me. Not that I’m any more self-centred than the next guy you understand. It’s just when you grow up different from anyone else in the world you get a little obsessed with finding out why.
And so began a long, slow, painful process of teasing the truth from my parents. Of finding out why I’m a freak, why my brothers were embarrassed by me, my sister felt sorry for me and why other people seemed to hate me. A biological curse rising every few generations to remind and punish us for that terrible day the first off-worlders came to our planet. It was a tragic error of scale and communication that might have turned the Earth into a smouldering cinder. Stupid and dangerous to assume that just because a cat wears a collar it’s sentient, especially when you’re three inches tall and look very similar to a mouse.
You’d think that, with all those things going against me, people might understand why I had to stand up for myself. I got to know the signs, the looks from those slow-witted, spinless bullies as they’d size me up. Just because I was covered in fur didn’t mean I was soft and cuddly. Half of me was a savage animal, after all, a killing machine. A killing machine with a big sense of fun that didn’t see anything wrong in tormenting those that wanted to torment me. I began to look forward to those releases of anger and frustration. Easier by far to see me as the bad guy, the ‘other’ suspected and feared then exiled from school because those rodents that swaggered there finally learnt how to feel fear. Nature red in tooth and claw, but not the law and a lesson learnt. Trust my instincts but rule with my head.
The universe had begun to open to the world and we discovered it was filled with creatures that were stranger by far than anything we’d thought of in myth and legend. Suddenly I wasn’t a stranger in my homeland any more. I had the comfort of an explosion of diversity and I embraced it, going off-world to where the strange things were and feeling, at last, like I wasn’t extraordinary for being out of the ordinary.
I’ve seen things that you couldn’t imagine, beauty too difficult to describe and too deadly to embrace and ugliness that was pure and kind. I watched exploding stars that killed millions but seeded the birth of a hundred thousand new stars.
Then someone noticed me. In all that strangeness they saw potential, a talent I barely knew I had, but one that gave my life purpose. Detective, security agent, maybe even spy, but I was on the side of the good guys. And after years of being on my own, I had a partner to work with. A razor-sharp, electron fuelled intellect that could stop me feeling sorry for myself with one sarcastic insult. A friend of a thousand interchangeable bodies to whom I trusted my life and he never let me down, well almost. But it was close and I paid a toll because I nearly lost my mind. I’ve got an easier mission now; maybe? I’m running background security at a performing arts centre. How hard can that be?
Digby Borders
And so began a long, slow, painful process of teasing the truth from my parents. Of finding out why I’m a freak, why my brothers were embarrassed by me, my sister felt sorry for me and why other people seemed to hate me. A biological curse rising every few generations to remind and punish us for that terrible day the first off-worlders came to our planet. It was a tragic error of scale and communication that might have turned the Earth into a smouldering cinder. Stupid and dangerous to assume that just because a cat wears a collar it’s sentient, especially when you’re three inches tall and look very similar to a mouse.
You’d think that, with all those things going against me, people might understand why I had to stand up for myself. I got to know the signs, the looks from those slow-witted, spinless bullies as they’d size me up. Just because I was covered in fur didn’t mean I was soft and cuddly. Half of me was a savage animal, after all, a killing machine. A killing machine with a big sense of fun that didn’t see anything wrong in tormenting those that wanted to torment me. I began to look forward to those releases of anger and frustration. Easier by far to see me as the bad guy, the ‘other’ suspected and feared then exiled from school because those rodents that swaggered there finally learnt how to feel fear. Nature red in tooth and claw, but not the law and a lesson learnt. Trust my instincts but rule with my head.
The universe had begun to open to the world and we discovered it was filled with creatures that were stranger by far than anything we’d thought of in myth and legend. Suddenly I wasn’t a stranger in my homeland any more. I had the comfort of an explosion of diversity and I embraced it, going off-world to where the strange things were and feeling, at last, like I wasn’t extraordinary for being out of the ordinary.
I’ve seen things that you couldn’t imagine, beauty too difficult to describe and too deadly to embrace and ugliness that was pure and kind. I watched exploding stars that killed millions but seeded the birth of a hundred thousand new stars.
Then someone noticed me. In all that strangeness they saw potential, a talent I barely knew I had, but one that gave my life purpose. Detective, security agent, maybe even spy, but I was on the side of the good guys. And after years of being on my own, I had a partner to work with. A razor-sharp, electron fuelled intellect that could stop me feeling sorry for myself with one sarcastic insult. A friend of a thousand interchangeable bodies to whom I trusted my life and he never let me down, well almost. But it was close and I paid a toll because I nearly lost my mind. I’ve got an easier mission now; maybe? I’m running background security at a performing arts centre. How hard can that be?
Digby Borders
End