Stuff100: Children and Monsters
Apr. 11th, 2012 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeChildren and Monsters
Prompt: Choices
Word Count: 1984
Summary: M.D. and Biff try and figure out what makes a monster.
Notes: Takes place not long after Six Weeks to Recovery. Inspired when I read the relevant quote over the shoulder of the person sitting next to me on the bus.
Eventually, Biff’s liking for Steinbeck overrode his distrust of anything longer than a hundred twenty pages. After smacking through Of Mice and Men (which he liked) and Sweet Thursday (which he liked more), we took on East of Eden. The edition I had was well over five-hundred pages, by Biff’s standard a literary Mount Everest.
My naturally loud, piercing voice came in handy, because it meant he could listen while cleaning and puttering around the sty. Biff’s gunshot wounds had been over two months ago now, long enough for him to be nearly fully recovered, and when he wasn’t catastrophically injured, he wasn’t one for sitting still for hours on end. Apparently he’d given up all pretenses that pop radio was comparable entertainment.
Things went without interruption until the introduction of the character Cathy, the unsettling little girl who embodied a particularly feminine brand of evil.
He had his back to me, scrubbing down the stove, and I was absorbed in the pages, so I didn’t notice his attention at first. I just figured his scouring had grown less violent because he’d finally triumphed over the worst of it.
Then we got to page seventy-four, when Cathy started learning about sexual power.
“‘What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality,’” I read. “‘The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.’”
Biff snorted, then gave a sharp, bitter bark of laughter.
“You think you a monster, kid?” He asked me.
“Yes.”
Apparently he hadn’t expected that answer, at least not right away. He paused to glance at me over his shoulder.
“But not for that,” I hastened to clarify. “That’s just silly. Sexuality makes monsters of plenty of humans. Ask Jeffrey Dahmer. No, I’m a monster for way different reasons—and more importantly, I’m lousy at it. I scrape into the human category, I think. Most of the time.”
“Huh.”
“So what about you?” I asked, hooking my ankles around the chair legs and resting my chin on the back. “Do you think your sexuality makes you a human or a monster?”
He gave me a sharp look, then, when he saw that the question was serious, turned back to the stove and returned to his scrubbing with renewed vigor. “Naw. Just makes me a faggot. Keep reading.”
I was a bit dubious, but his tone wasn’t angry, just weirdly muted, so I did. Within a few paragraphs, a preteen Cathy was tying herself up and getting teenage boys framed for rape. This time, Biff interrupted me by pitching down his sponge and bellowing, “The fuck is this shit?”
“Pardon?”
Biff wheeled towards me. “The fuck? She’s ten. Fucking ten.”
“She’s not intended to be an actual person, Biff. She’s a symbolic representation of Satan.”
“She’s ten.”
“You really seem fixated on this ten thing. Come on, even someone as culturally deprived as you must know the archetype of the creepy evil child, surely you’ve seen Children of the Damned—”
“No, no, it—” He shook his hands with frustration, like I wasn’t getting it and it was vital he get the point across, even as he tried to pull the words out of his brain. “It don’t fucking work!”
“Hmm. Try again.”
I’d seen Biff fight his own temper before, but only once or twice, when I was trying to wind him up and he didn’t want to give me the satisfaction. This was the first time I’d seen him do it in any other context, and it was obviously not a skill he had much practice with. His chest heaved, he shook, and finally he shouted, “Fuck this shit!” and slammed out the door.
I sat there, page still poised to turn. Well. That had been… odd. Not that Biff exploding with rage was anything unusual, but—
The door burst open again, and Biff pointed one accusing finger at me. “Don’t go nowhere,” he snarled at me, and then slammed out a second time.
I blinked. “Okay then.”
I marked my place, put the book on the table, and went to pick the sponge up from its puddle on the floor. Once Biff remembered it, he’d just get angry all over again about having to clean it. Then, since I was up already with the sponge in my hand, it seemed natural to pick up where he left off and wipe down the counters. The stove, I left alone; the amount of hardened grease and tomato sauce baked on it were beyond the power of my scrawny muscles. Let Biff tackle that one.
I had finished that and was just wondering whether I was up to tackling any of the terrifying stacks of dishes in the broken sink when Biff returned. He was breathing hard and his shirt was damp with sweat, but he seemed to have calmed down.
“Feeling more coherent?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Want to try that conversation again?”
He flopped into the chair I’d been using, panting, and picked up the book. Gave a thick cough into his hand.
I propped my elbows on the counter. “You need to quit smoking.”
He flashed an obscene gesture at me and flipped to my marker. After a search for the line, he held the marker to the page and squinted at the letters. I waited for him to forge through on his own; I knew he was a ponderous reader and it’d take him a while. Reading it apparently upset him again, but whatever exertion he’d done seemed to tone it down. He didn’t even throw the book across the room, just thunked it down hard on the table and took a deep breath. His frown was still upset, but it didn’t look like he was about to explode. It looked like he was thinking, trying to put the words together.
“It’s bullshit,” he said. “Ain’t nobody that good at being evil when they’re ten.”
His voice was slow and his brow furrowed, like what he was saying was just as novel to him as it was to me. Biff interjected with comments and retorts fairly regularly when I read, but he never seemed to put much thought into it, not like this. Curious, I ran with it.
I cocked my head. “Biff, I told you, she’s not supposed to be a believable, real child. Nobody actually believes that any ten-year-old would—”
“Yeah they do.” His voice was quiet.
I halted. “Um.”
He gave me a cynical look. “What they say ‘bout you when you was ten?”
“That’s different,” I protested. “I really am a monster.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m just trained better now.”
“Uh huh.” He was nodding to himself with an odd smile, like he was puzzling through some deep philosophical question and making some headway.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“You a monster.”
“I believe I’ve verified that, yes.”
“Why?”
“Biff, this isn’t funny, you know full well—”
“C’mon, dammit, ain’t like you gonna shock me or nothing. Why you a monster?”
I just glared at him.
“Cuz you kill shit, right?”
“If I functioned properly,” I said coolly. “As is, I just hurt things.”
He snorted. “Kid, I hurt way more folks’n you do.”
“Yeah, well, you have a few years on me. Give me some time to catch up.”
“You think I was a monster when I was ten?”
By now I was starting to get a bit aggravated. “Of course not, now what—”
The anger was gone from him now; he seemed almost manic, intent on chasing this down, whatever it was. “You sure? I was a little shit.”
“You were ten.”
“You too.”
“That’s different, I broke furniture, I bit people—”
“I vanished everything around a guy once, beat the shit outta him while he was blind and told him if he pissed me off again, I’d keep him blind forever. I was eleven.” He paused. “Maybe twelve. I forget.”
I stared at him. “Whoa, really?”
“Told you I was a shit.”
“I just… what’d he do?”
His expression shut down. “What’d they do to make you bite ‘em?”
“I don’t see how that has anything to do with—oh my god.” I suddenly realized what he was getting at. “Are you saying… that maybe there’s a reason we’re monsters?”
He shifted uncomfortably in the chair, crossed his arms. “Well, I dunno about me or nothing, but you, sure.”
I snorted. “Please. That sounds like New Age abdication of responsibility to me.”
“Kid, they raised you in a goddamn tank on Planet Killstuff or whatever it was.”
“Della, and that was ages ago. I don’t even remember it, so I fail to see how that excuses my behavior.”
“Hey, who said excuses? I ain’t said shit about no excuses. Just… y’know. Reasons.”
I hesitated, looked at him sidelong. “I don’t know… I don’t remember any of it. How can something I don’t remember influence me? You at least have a functioning long-term memory. You have a reason for past events to have an influence on you. I’m just… a monster. I was always a monster, and I’m a monster now.”
“You really think babies just come outta nowhere monsters?”
“I chose to be a monster, Biff. I got to start my life all over again, clean slate and everything, and I was still the demon of the foster care system. I still bit people and threw fits and furniture whenever I didn’t get my way.”
He started. “You was in foster care?”
I rolled my eyes. “Biff, of course I was in foster care. I was an animal. Even if I hadn’t been way past my cute expiration date, nobody would’ve ever been able to pass me off as their descendant.”
Biff frowned. “How old were you?”
“You know I can’t answer that.”
“But you wasn’t old, right? You was… what, kindergarten or something, right?”
I shrugged. “I guess thereabouts. That’s what they thought I looked like, anyway.”
“Just… seems like if for five years, everybody telling you, you’re a monster, you’re a monster on Planet Killstuff—”
“Della.”
“Whatever—not like you’d know it was over when they put you down here. Not like you’d know the war was over and shit, right?”
I was beginning to feel decidedly uneasy. “Well fine then, Doctor Freud, you like talking about my childhood so much, what about you? What’s your reason?”
At least I wasn’t the only one looking uncomfortable now. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Which made me blink. That wasn’t a retort of ‘you already know,’ that was outright avoidance. Which meant… “Wait, there’s more?”
The look that went across Biff’s face was so quick, I almost didn’t catch it. Even then, I was sure I’d misread it, because I’d never actually seen fear on him before. “I said I don’t wanna talk ‘bout it!”
His fists were clenching, and there were only so many times I trusted Biff to control his temper in one day. I dropped it, and we sat in silence, me feeling weirdly uncertain and uncomfortable, Biff looking like he was struggling not to blow up again. Finally he shoved the chair back, swiped the sponge from me, and went back to scouring the stove like it was the source of all his frustrations. I stayed where I was, elbows propped on the counter, mulling things over.
“She gonna be a big character?” Biff asked.
It took me a moment to realize what he meant. “Cathy? Yeah.”
“She get worse?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I don’t wanna read this guy no more.”
“Okay.”
The next time, I brought Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Biff took to that a lot better, and East of Eden joined the stack of other books he’d rejected.
We never read Steinbeck again.
Prompt: Choices
Word Count: 1984
Summary: M.D. and Biff try and figure out what makes a monster.
Notes: Takes place not long after Six Weeks to Recovery. Inspired when I read the relevant quote over the shoulder of the person sitting next to me on the bus.
Eventually, Biff’s liking for Steinbeck overrode his distrust of anything longer than a hundred twenty pages. After smacking through Of Mice and Men (which he liked) and Sweet Thursday (which he liked more), we took on East of Eden. The edition I had was well over five-hundred pages, by Biff’s standard a literary Mount Everest.
My naturally loud, piercing voice came in handy, because it meant he could listen while cleaning and puttering around the sty. Biff’s gunshot wounds had been over two months ago now, long enough for him to be nearly fully recovered, and when he wasn’t catastrophically injured, he wasn’t one for sitting still for hours on end. Apparently he’d given up all pretenses that pop radio was comparable entertainment.
Things went without interruption until the introduction of the character Cathy, the unsettling little girl who embodied a particularly feminine brand of evil.
He had his back to me, scrubbing down the stove, and I was absorbed in the pages, so I didn’t notice his attention at first. I just figured his scouring had grown less violent because he’d finally triumphed over the worst of it.
Then we got to page seventy-four, when Cathy started learning about sexual power.
“‘What freedom men and women could have, were they not constantly tricked and trapped and enslaved and tortured by their sexuality,’” I read. “‘The only drawback in that freedom is that without it one would not be a human. One would be a monster.’”
Biff snorted, then gave a sharp, bitter bark of laughter.
“You think you a monster, kid?” He asked me.
“Yes.”
Apparently he hadn’t expected that answer, at least not right away. He paused to glance at me over his shoulder.
“But not for that,” I hastened to clarify. “That’s just silly. Sexuality makes monsters of plenty of humans. Ask Jeffrey Dahmer. No, I’m a monster for way different reasons—and more importantly, I’m lousy at it. I scrape into the human category, I think. Most of the time.”
“Huh.”
“So what about you?” I asked, hooking my ankles around the chair legs and resting my chin on the back. “Do you think your sexuality makes you a human or a monster?”
He gave me a sharp look, then, when he saw that the question was serious, turned back to the stove and returned to his scrubbing with renewed vigor. “Naw. Just makes me a faggot. Keep reading.”
I was a bit dubious, but his tone wasn’t angry, just weirdly muted, so I did. Within a few paragraphs, a preteen Cathy was tying herself up and getting teenage boys framed for rape. This time, Biff interrupted me by pitching down his sponge and bellowing, “The fuck is this shit?”
“Pardon?”
Biff wheeled towards me. “The fuck? She’s ten. Fucking ten.”
“She’s not intended to be an actual person, Biff. She’s a symbolic representation of Satan.”
“She’s ten.”
“You really seem fixated on this ten thing. Come on, even someone as culturally deprived as you must know the archetype of the creepy evil child, surely you’ve seen Children of the Damned—”
“No, no, it—” He shook his hands with frustration, like I wasn’t getting it and it was vital he get the point across, even as he tried to pull the words out of his brain. “It don’t fucking work!”
“Hmm. Try again.”
I’d seen Biff fight his own temper before, but only once or twice, when I was trying to wind him up and he didn’t want to give me the satisfaction. This was the first time I’d seen him do it in any other context, and it was obviously not a skill he had much practice with. His chest heaved, he shook, and finally he shouted, “Fuck this shit!” and slammed out the door.
I sat there, page still poised to turn. Well. That had been… odd. Not that Biff exploding with rage was anything unusual, but—
The door burst open again, and Biff pointed one accusing finger at me. “Don’t go nowhere,” he snarled at me, and then slammed out a second time.
I blinked. “Okay then.”
I marked my place, put the book on the table, and went to pick the sponge up from its puddle on the floor. Once Biff remembered it, he’d just get angry all over again about having to clean it. Then, since I was up already with the sponge in my hand, it seemed natural to pick up where he left off and wipe down the counters. The stove, I left alone; the amount of hardened grease and tomato sauce baked on it were beyond the power of my scrawny muscles. Let Biff tackle that one.
I had finished that and was just wondering whether I was up to tackling any of the terrifying stacks of dishes in the broken sink when Biff returned. He was breathing hard and his shirt was damp with sweat, but he seemed to have calmed down.
“Feeling more coherent?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Want to try that conversation again?”
He flopped into the chair I’d been using, panting, and picked up the book. Gave a thick cough into his hand.
I propped my elbows on the counter. “You need to quit smoking.”
He flashed an obscene gesture at me and flipped to my marker. After a search for the line, he held the marker to the page and squinted at the letters. I waited for him to forge through on his own; I knew he was a ponderous reader and it’d take him a while. Reading it apparently upset him again, but whatever exertion he’d done seemed to tone it down. He didn’t even throw the book across the room, just thunked it down hard on the table and took a deep breath. His frown was still upset, but it didn’t look like he was about to explode. It looked like he was thinking, trying to put the words together.
“It’s bullshit,” he said. “Ain’t nobody that good at being evil when they’re ten.”
His voice was slow and his brow furrowed, like what he was saying was just as novel to him as it was to me. Biff interjected with comments and retorts fairly regularly when I read, but he never seemed to put much thought into it, not like this. Curious, I ran with it.
I cocked my head. “Biff, I told you, she’s not supposed to be a believable, real child. Nobody actually believes that any ten-year-old would—”
“Yeah they do.” His voice was quiet.
I halted. “Um.”
He gave me a cynical look. “What they say ‘bout you when you was ten?”
“That’s different,” I protested. “I really am a monster.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m just trained better now.”
“Uh huh.” He was nodding to himself with an odd smile, like he was puzzling through some deep philosophical question and making some headway.
“What? What’s so funny?”
“You a monster.”
“I believe I’ve verified that, yes.”
“Why?”
“Biff, this isn’t funny, you know full well—”
“C’mon, dammit, ain’t like you gonna shock me or nothing. Why you a monster?”
I just glared at him.
“Cuz you kill shit, right?”
“If I functioned properly,” I said coolly. “As is, I just hurt things.”
He snorted. “Kid, I hurt way more folks’n you do.”
“Yeah, well, you have a few years on me. Give me some time to catch up.”
“You think I was a monster when I was ten?”
By now I was starting to get a bit aggravated. “Of course not, now what—”
The anger was gone from him now; he seemed almost manic, intent on chasing this down, whatever it was. “You sure? I was a little shit.”
“You were ten.”
“You too.”
“That’s different, I broke furniture, I bit people—”
“I vanished everything around a guy once, beat the shit outta him while he was blind and told him if he pissed me off again, I’d keep him blind forever. I was eleven.” He paused. “Maybe twelve. I forget.”
I stared at him. “Whoa, really?”
“Told you I was a shit.”
“I just… what’d he do?”
His expression shut down. “What’d they do to make you bite ‘em?”
“I don’t see how that has anything to do with—oh my god.” I suddenly realized what he was getting at. “Are you saying… that maybe there’s a reason we’re monsters?”
He shifted uncomfortably in the chair, crossed his arms. “Well, I dunno about me or nothing, but you, sure.”
I snorted. “Please. That sounds like New Age abdication of responsibility to me.”
“Kid, they raised you in a goddamn tank on Planet Killstuff or whatever it was.”
“Della, and that was ages ago. I don’t even remember it, so I fail to see how that excuses my behavior.”
“Hey, who said excuses? I ain’t said shit about no excuses. Just… y’know. Reasons.”
I hesitated, looked at him sidelong. “I don’t know… I don’t remember any of it. How can something I don’t remember influence me? You at least have a functioning long-term memory. You have a reason for past events to have an influence on you. I’m just… a monster. I was always a monster, and I’m a monster now.”
“You really think babies just come outta nowhere monsters?”
“I chose to be a monster, Biff. I got to start my life all over again, clean slate and everything, and I was still the demon of the foster care system. I still bit people and threw fits and furniture whenever I didn’t get my way.”
He started. “You was in foster care?”
I rolled my eyes. “Biff, of course I was in foster care. I was an animal. Even if I hadn’t been way past my cute expiration date, nobody would’ve ever been able to pass me off as their descendant.”
Biff frowned. “How old were you?”
“You know I can’t answer that.”
“But you wasn’t old, right? You was… what, kindergarten or something, right?”
I shrugged. “I guess thereabouts. That’s what they thought I looked like, anyway.”
“Just… seems like if for five years, everybody telling you, you’re a monster, you’re a monster on Planet Killstuff—”
“Della.”
“Whatever—not like you’d know it was over when they put you down here. Not like you’d know the war was over and shit, right?”
I was beginning to feel decidedly uneasy. “Well fine then, Doctor Freud, you like talking about my childhood so much, what about you? What’s your reason?”
At least I wasn’t the only one looking uncomfortable now. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Which made me blink. That wasn’t a retort of ‘you already know,’ that was outright avoidance. Which meant… “Wait, there’s more?”
The look that went across Biff’s face was so quick, I almost didn’t catch it. Even then, I was sure I’d misread it, because I’d never actually seen fear on him before. “I said I don’t wanna talk ‘bout it!”
His fists were clenching, and there were only so many times I trusted Biff to control his temper in one day. I dropped it, and we sat in silence, me feeling weirdly uncertain and uncomfortable, Biff looking like he was struggling not to blow up again. Finally he shoved the chair back, swiped the sponge from me, and went back to scouring the stove like it was the source of all his frustrations. I stayed where I was, elbows propped on the counter, mulling things over.
“She gonna be a big character?” Biff asked.
It took me a moment to realize what he meant. “Cathy? Yeah.”
“She get worse?”
“Oh yeah.”
“I don’t wanna read this guy no more.”
“Okay.”
The next time, I brought Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Biff took to that a lot better, and East of Eden joined the stack of other books he’d rejected.
We never read Steinbeck again.
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Date: 2013-07-06 12:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-07-06 01:31 am (UTC)