Only a change of worlds

When she was eight, Mary Kelly also felt the hard sting of death and violence in her own backyard. At the time she didn’t yet realize that just 12,000 years and one universe away, another little girl knew the same thing, and that in all universes with Terra as a homing planet, women and children had born the brunt of revolution and death for time immemorial. She was playing with her best friend, a boy who lived two houses down in a small sunny neighborhood where nearly everyone had a basketball goal and ran around barefoot during the hot Texas summers. He was the son of a private investigator and former Marine, and by the time he was five he was already well on his way to becoming an Alpha Male. Mary liked Alpha Males because they were more adventuresome and often got her into trouble. What she didn’t realize was that she was well on her way to becoming an Alpha Female and that (unfortunately, there were no Wikipedia entries for this one, proving..) they were fewer and farther between than Alpha Males. Alpha Males in all herd-gathering societies generally treated Alpha Females with distrust, mostly because they were used to dealing with Submissive Males and Females whose opinions were more easily swayed.

This was the lesson she learned when she was eight:

“Adam! Look what fell out of the tree! I think it’s a mockingbird!” The tiny creature, wet and squirming, looked like an alien with its big hungry mouth and tiny eyes screaming for comfort.

“Ew, it’s probably got rabies!” said Adam, and smashed it with a stick.

The baby bird screamed even louder, and now the mother mockingbird furiously dove at the boy, who laughed nervously and ducked.

“NO!” cried Mary, heartbroken. She pushed Adam away and cupped the tiny, crushed creature in her hands. Blood and tiny intestines spilled out from its side, and she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her face and onto her shirt. “Why did you do that? Why would you hurt it? It wasn’t going to hurt you!” she sobbed, staring straight into Adam’s precocious eyes.

“It was going to die anyways.” He lowered his eyes finally, deflecting.

Mary took the bird inside and decided never to speak to Adam again. It died in a small shoe box lined with soft cloth, and she buried it under a rose bush in the back yard. She never told on him, just like she hadn’t told on him when he threw sand in her eyes, even though when she threw it back, he ran screaming and didn’t invite her over for two weeks. She never told anyone about the bird, but she knew right then that something was terribly wrong with the world, when someone so young could kill something so helpless without thinking twice about it.

She was eleven when she read a speech by Chief Seattle on the eve of his people’s slow destruction. When she was sixteen, she read the testimonies of slaughterhouse workers who killed chickens for a living, and curled up in a ball and cried hard for three hours straight, and never ate meat again. When she was seventeen, she learned in a late night confession that her closest girlfriend, whom she had known since she was four, had been brutally raped by her mother’s boyfriend the same year that Mary stopped talking to Adam. She also learned that many children disappeared each year and had been ritualistically raped or sold into war, and she suspected there was a connection between the madness of the world and the torture of a life. She suspected that something happened on a metaphysical level when a soul was broken by violence. She did not know that Adam, even conditioned as a maturing Alpha, had been brutally raped by his adopted father, and that this lead him to believe that life was suffering and that Alpha-ness was about taking what you can and asserting your masculinity at every chance you get.

This is what Mary Kelly learned when she was eight. And when she was twenty-three, she learned that all universes revolving around the planet Terra were experiencing the same sad stories. All things were connected, like in that Stephen King book she read, and there was a center to all worlds that once held fast, and now was crumbling. But she suspected that when Atlantis finally sunk once and for all, something of the truth would be saved.