Skeletons in the Cupboard

Trash Talking

December 2016

The coffee was getting cold, and there was no way to make it warmer. My ears were like trees in a bad storm, taking up the bad and worst of the air, pumping them into my head only to burst its own bloodstream.

It was raining out, and for the most part, the place was quiet. The coffee I ordered was twice the price of my usual drinks, but it’s my favourite, it’s the one I reserve for the very best or the very worst of days, or when I have a craving for it, and God knows what I’m capable of doing when I have a craving for something. I enjoy it, mostly, I always enjoy it. But this time there was poison in the air, within earshot, three chairs down. Two know-it-all chatting among themselves as if they have any idea what they were talking about. I so wanted to come right up there and smack their little lips, blunt their little lies.

But violence on violence was never a solution.

They were talking about the mutants. Of course they are. Of course that’s all everybody talk about these days. They were talking about the mutated people who came out from the radiation zone, those with two heads and three eyes and wings on their back. Those who could see without eyes, or the ones who could walk without legs. What they tend to forget, when they talk about them, was that they were just as much people as they were.

I don’t understand why no one else could see it that way. A man comes up with fangs in their mouth and super-human strength and they were so easy to dismiss him as a monster.

Maybe I was a special case. Maybe spending my childhood in one of those irradiated towns changed me. Maybe it just made me more sensitive, maybe it made me a little more like them.

I don’t even remember most of my childhood. They said they found me when I was nine, wandering alone between buildings whose atmosphere would set unprotected eyes alight. I was normal, unmutated, in their eyes, fully human. My only crime was surviving, and it wasn’t a crime enough to warrant discrimination. Besides, I was a child. And at that time, it was enough.

Nowadays, it wasn’t. Hide your third eyes, or they’ll brand you criminals. Cut off your wings and pray for your survival, because otherwise it’ll be hunger and poverty that’ll get you. A child who came out of a disaster area with six fingers on one of her hands? They might just send her right back.

I was lucky. Luckier than most. And the professor taught me that throwing a punch would be throwing it all away. So I sat, nursed my coffee and tried not to mind that it was getting cold, that it was almost more than I can afford, that I wasn’t enjoying it because I was stopping myself from lashing out. Their hatred flowed in and out of my ears and I wanted to shut it down.

The professor taught me that I was lucky enough to even get out, that throwing it away would be a crime.

I’ve always hated that son of a bitch.