“You’re gross,” the small child said.
My first thought was, Yes, yes, child, I know. For I probably have many transmittable diseases yet to be discovered which I’ve passed on to dozens of whores by now, but the only thing that kept the thought in my mouth was the mud that turned “Yes, yes,” into, “yrfh flrfb.” Or something comparably eloquent.
I picked my face up out of the mud and sputtered muck, several times, before finally sitting up, elbows quivering from the effort to hold me. By the time I’d wiped the muck away from my eyes and mouth, I’d thought the speaker had moved on, but lo and behold, there the speaker still stood. Clean, innocent (stupid), small in stature, not in circumference, which was fed further by the chocolate treat she was licking, creating a ring of delectable mud (sorry, chocolate) around her mouth.
She smiled up at me as I sat back in the filthy gutter into which I’d been tossed, and my headache seemed to worsen. It was helped along by the way she swayed and twisted her hips, prematurely developed by fat, and her bright baby blue eyes that said, “Careful, I’ll kick you in the nuts.” But likely also because the morning sun glared into my face.
I returned the smile as I wiped my hand down across my jaw and mouth, rubbing the mud and filth away from my hairy chin, and found myself hoping my smile said something equally illness-inducing.
“You know what’s really gross, my dear?” I said to her in the clearest, most civil tone I could muster.
“Your nose is all bendy,” she said instead, smacking her lips around her chocolate delight. “It’s big like my grandpappy’s, except his is pointier.”
“What’s really gross,” I continued as I wiped the rest of my face off on my black sleeve, “is people.”
“I took a bath last night,” she bragged proudly. I began to wonder if she was deaf.
So I continued.
“People are filthy. They will say one thing and mean something entirely different, smile while they open up your insides and spill your guts so you don’t have to. That’s terribly polite of them, isn’t it, to save you the trouble? Sometimes people will rape—do you know what rape is, little girl?”
She shook her head.
“Rape is when a man sticks his penis inside a woman without her permission, and sometimes violently so! Sometimes there’s blood and there’s a lot of screaming as well, and the woman almost always gets hurt and sometimes killed in nasty ways.”
“What’s a penis?” the little girl frowned, no longer eating her yummy snack.
“Ask your mother. Several times, over and over and with great interest.”
“’Kay.”
“Sometimes people will rape without apologizing for it afterward,” I continued as I slicked my hair back out of my face, greasy and muddy as it was. “Then they will brag about it to their friends, and their friends will think this is okay, and they’ll laugh and laugh and laugh… but there are worse things than rape. There are people who will work their entire lives to do something they think is wonderful. They’ll hurt themselves to achieve it, they’ll pray every night, they’ll work days without sleep—and quite happily so—to do this one solitary thing…”
By now the girl was looking bored, so I leered forward, unafraid of scaring her, because her parents were not watching, and they should be punished for it.
“This one thing that they are so dedicated and passionate toward—whether it be enjoying their lives, raising their children, finding a cure for a disease, building something wonderful…! And finally one day they succeed… and the next day, do you know what happens?”
The child blinked and stuck her sweet delight in her mouth again to suck on it some more.
“They die,” I said. “Or their children suffer—they’re taken, they’re beaten, they’re killed in nasty, unfair ways— whichever you prefer to imagine. Or the disease they cured claims them instead. Or the thing they’ve built collapses in a storm, or is stolen from them and sold and a wonderful profit is made of which they receive none of, thus they’re made to sit and suffer poverty and misery and utter destitution because of one stranger’s greed.
“Or,” I continued, taking a breath, “one person has an opinion, and thinks himself so great for it that he simply must educate others toward his opinion simply because his is obviously correct and theirs is obviously not. Then people disagree, and they argue. Then arguments turn into fights, and fights turn into wars, my dear. Do you know what war is?”
“S’when people fight.”
“Good!” I sang cheerfully, “Good! But no, stupid, you’re wrong. War is when people die. There are fires, and there is blood, and bruises, cuts, and scrapes. Internal bleeding and ruptured arteries and organs, and lungs that fill with blood so fast you drown tasting your own fluids. And not only do you drown, poppet, you drown alone. And death is very, very cold, always in the winter time even when it’s summer—you’ll understand that as you grow older.
“War is when people take advantage and consider it fair, for the sake of their opinion, for the sake of being unable to keep their gluttonous mouths shut, for the sake of more, more, more. War is when blood is lost, homes are burned, mothers—just like your own—are screaming, and children—just like yourself—are crying because nobody is coming to their rescue. Nobody is coming because nobody cares.
“Nobody cares that their neighbor is bleeding. Nobody cares that their neighbor is a man who lives in the alleyway next to their flat who is contemplating eating their own toes for food but don’t realize they’ve already done that because they’re mad.
“Nobody cares. And that, my dear bulbous little sprat… is gross.”
The little girl had been properly silenced, and she stood there staring at me, sitting in filth and dripping with the same, my eye blackened and cheek bruised, the blood dry beneath my nose from whence it had come, tunic torn and smelling of sweat and liquor. She stood likewise in her tiny dress, altered to accommodate her parents’ inability to properly design her diet, her golden curls framing her round, rosy face, blue eyes staring unblinking up at my own.
And for a moment, we connected, this little girl and I. I smiled sweetly, baring my off-white teeth. “Where are your mummy and daddy, poppet?”
Gaping at me, she pointed at the bakery shop not far away from the pub I had laid in front of. A nice wagon sat parked nearby with the two well-groomed horses minding their own business. “Buying me a birthday cake…”
“Oh! Is that so? How old are you turning?”
“Seven…”
“How delightful. You know what else is gross?”
She shook her head.
I plucked the chocolate treat from her hand and plopped it in the mud at her dainty, clean feet. She stared down at it, lost and dejected as if she’d just lost a puppy. I stood up out of the muck. “You’ll forget everything I just said, but then learn it again all on your own.”
Without a hesitation, she thrust her foot out to kick me in the shin, which I pulled out of her reach and then swiveled to the side as she tried to kick me in the other leg. The result was her other foot slipping on the mud and depositing her on her backside, producing the most amusing “squelch” and the loudest scream you could imagine.
Turning and walking away down the street, aching and hung over, I listened to the distant bang of the cake shop door opening and the commotion that resulted. And as I disappeared down an empty alley way, stepping over a man sleeping on a burlap sack next to a quivering dog, I muttered to myself, “Gross indeed.”