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Daily Deviation
Daily Deviation
January 10, 2013
Rats by ~blue-isotropic is an intriguing twist on the dystopian genre. Suggested anonymously.
Featured by neurotype-on-discord
Literature Text
When I was a little girl, I went to church. Our church was an illegal one: the building was unregistered.
We would sit on the benches made from stolen floorboards and listen to a man dressed in black as he read us tales of angels coming to save righteous men from evil, their swords clean and their trumpets blaring.
The man dressed in black was old. He was sick. His Bible was missing pages.
One day in March, my mother turned to me and said clearly, "Masha, I want you to remember something for when you grow up." Maybe she knew she was dying. "God loves murderers."
I just looked up at her, thumb in my mouth. My mother was still a beautiful woman. She was young when a man at an after-riot party had given her a child inside of her, a bruise on her face, and a few kopeks for her trouble before running away forever.
So I watched the dirty gray sunlight washing through her sickly blonde hair, watched it illuminate the dark hollows of her eyes, watched her face, and asked, "Why, mama?"
She ran a finger across her rosary, counting the beads. Maybe conversing with saints, maybe worrying about rent. I could never tell. "Because there are too many people on this Earth, so He needs a way to get rid of some."
She knelt so she could look at my eyes. "Masha, we are like rats everywhere. Rats in cages sometimes eat each other, or they trample each other. Or they chew the cage to bits."
I knew the principal of this. We lived in Moscow. Even then, we drowned in the desert of tired, dirty people walking the subways and alleys and roofway levels every day.
I tried to make sense of her words with all of my four-year-old heart. "So then God, He doesn't love rats?"
Mama gave me a hug, the corners of her eyes crinkling and her eyebrows arching up in a painful smile, and picked me up.
"Oh, Masha, no. No, He loves everything. But especially murderers."
We would sit on the benches made from stolen floorboards and listen to a man dressed in black as he read us tales of angels coming to save righteous men from evil, their swords clean and their trumpets blaring.
The man dressed in black was old. He was sick. His Bible was missing pages.
One day in March, my mother turned to me and said clearly, "Masha, I want you to remember something for when you grow up." Maybe she knew she was dying. "God loves murderers."
I just looked up at her, thumb in my mouth. My mother was still a beautiful woman. She was young when a man at an after-riot party had given her a child inside of her, a bruise on her face, and a few kopeks for her trouble before running away forever.
So I watched the dirty gray sunlight washing through her sickly blonde hair, watched it illuminate the dark hollows of her eyes, watched her face, and asked, "Why, mama?"
She ran a finger across her rosary, counting the beads. Maybe conversing with saints, maybe worrying about rent. I could never tell. "Because there are too many people on this Earth, so He needs a way to get rid of some."
She knelt so she could look at my eyes. "Masha, we are like rats everywhere. Rats in cages sometimes eat each other, or they trample each other. Or they chew the cage to bits."
I knew the principal of this. We lived in Moscow. Even then, we drowned in the desert of tired, dirty people walking the subways and alleys and roofway levels every day.
I tried to make sense of her words with all of my four-year-old heart. "So then God, He doesn't love rats?"
Mama gave me a hug, the corners of her eyes crinkling and her eyebrows arching up in a painful smile, and picked me up.
"Oh, Masha, no. No, He loves everything. But especially murderers."
Literature
the trans-, the pan- and the asexual.
i.
They said
He couldn't feel like a boy
And a girl
At the same time.
So he grew his hair long
With colorful dreadlocks
And wore eyeliner
But kept his name.
ii.
They told her that
She could either love boys
Or girls
Or both.
Not everyone.
So she fell in love
With the boy who
Was born as a girl.
iii.
He didn't feel love
For the girl with the large chest.
Or the boy with the sparkling eyes.
But that didn't mean
He didn't love them
In his own way.
If that boy's way of loving is
Invisible,
And the boy with the long hair and eyeliner's way of loving is
Invisible,
And the girl who had a taste for personality, not ge
Literature
The Seizures
Skye has a seizure at dusk, and we're alone.
I hold her wrists
down
so she doesn't fall from her hospital bed,
turn her on her side and hit the nurse distress button
screaming for someone to help us.
She's shaking uncontrollably,
and the bracelets on her wrists move
in a discordant lullaby.
Then it's over,
and the nurses come and check her pulse,
her blood oxygen, her motor control.
She can talk again, but she's confused
and doesn't know who she is.
She can't move her legs.
I stroke her hair and tell her where she is,
help her slow her breathing, and help the nurses.
Our roommates return, and she starts seizin
Literature
All the Things You Never Knew
It was your favorite thing to say. “We know everything about each other. Not just the good things, but even the bad ones. We have no secrets.” And the way your eyes lit up when you said it, how your arm would curl around my shoulders and squeeze me against you… I couldn’t say anything. I promised myself that I would when we were alone, but the moment always seemed wrong and eventually the fact that I still had secrets became a secret itself.
It turns out I wasn’t the only one.
I never told you about the crying or the cutting or the nights I spent awake staring at the bottle of pills. I was terrified it would b
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This one's set way in the future, when the Earth is even more ridiculously overcrowded than it is now.
Also, I'm not actually Christian. Or, obviously, Russian. Or from the future. But you probably knew that.
EDIT OH GOD DD. I haven't checked this account in so longgg I can't even respond to all this oh god
Thank you so much for your support, deviantArt!
Also, I'm not actually Christian. Or, obviously, Russian. Or from the future. But you probably knew that.
EDIT OH GOD DD. I haven't checked this account in so longgg I can't even respond to all this oh god
Thank you so much for your support, deviantArt!
© 2012 - 2024 blue-isotropic
Comments56
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Interesting concept. Definitely poignant in its own weird way. Well done!