Microstory 227: Perspective Two

This is an experimental Perspectives microstory. The introduction can be found in Microstory 225. More to follow.

I lived my whole life in a commune. My parents fall on the spectrum somewhere between love-dovey tree-hugging hippie, and paranoid down-with-the-government gun freaks. This sounds like they would be normal people, but they aren’t. We lived almost completely off the grid. We grew our own food, organic of course, and sometimes had enough left over to sell. Before I was born, my family still lived within society, and they started canning food for an oncoming apocalypse. The great thing about being paranoid about the end is that no one can really prove that it’s not going to happen. It’s perpetually in the future, so as long as you don’t focus on a date--like Christian doomsday howlers--you’re safe. Not long ago, my aunt and uncle stormed in with a horde of private security operatives, removing me and the other children from what they deemed a cult. This wasn’t, strictly speaking, legal, but another good thing about my parents being afraid of the government is that they refused to press charges. In the eyes of the law, I should still be sent back to them, but their hate speech and violence during the proceedings were enough to convince the court that theirs was an unsafe environment. My aunt and uncle were extremely rich, so it was an jarring change of pace moving in with them. I had to start school at a preparatory academy, but ended up being dropped to homeschooling because my education up to that point was insufficient at best. Despite all the security my new guardians invested in, they were no match for my captor. He was utterly delusional, and insisted that I was living in squalor. I’m just a kid, so I couldn’t stop him from taking me away. I spent two months in a room. He stuffed me in a baby’s crib and hit me if I ever tried to speak, because he thought I was much younger than I was. I started chewing on my hairbrush as soon as he allowed me to have one. He was having trouble deciding whether I was an infant or a preteen, I guess. I could only chew a little at a time, and would have to hide the sharp handle under a doily when I wasn’t using it. But today, I’ve finished with it, and I’m satisfied with the results. I crawl back into my crib, tuck it under my chest, and wait. When he comes up, I stab him with it and run off. The good thing about the man thinking I’m someone I’m not is that he doesn’t know my parents forced me to run three miles almost every day since I was eight.