“Everything’s a long leg.”

I emerged from it. You also. A beginning that cannot stop, and an end that will never start. We are the flowering of collapse, confused as to whether we break with the wave or particulate in molecular reformation. To be whatever function the Oceanic Triangular Unity Reality defines for us. Soggy like the mud on a damp day. Ever put your foot down in wet mud? Squelch, the word is squelch, but the thing of it is somewhere else, inside us both there. In reality my thoughts, my life, are inconsequential to you and your deal. But, I’ll show you, how the things that anchor me could very well come to pull you down too despite the gulf of time that separates us. And it is a whole raft of time that separates us. Not so much, but very a lot. If we are waves then we connect in parallel, if particles then you are me recycled. So be it and let me begin.

I grew up near a sea, but not directly next to a sea, in an area of the World that contained trees, it contained a river and a few streams, it contained grass land, and, most frequently, it was filled with rocks and rocky outcrops. We moved around in this area of the world, limited as it had become, making good on what the situation afforded us. Collecting, for fire, wood near the trees, washing ourselves around the rivers and streams, and grazing goats and cows on the grasslands to collect their wool, meat, milk and feces. Not all at the same time.

When we were around rock, especially large open formations of rocks, we would commit to practising our religion. I was told that the rock was what housed the afterlife or something like that. Okay, so, it was like rock was this presence of death within the realm of the living. But not really like that. Let me try again, it was like the presence of the rock allowed the dead to pass from the world where there is life to the world where it makes sense to have a death that exists in a space where there was life. Like a bridge that doesn’t really go anywhere, yeah? Either way, I never met a single dead person near the rock or understood what was going on with that whole thing. I guess making sense of death is a kind of game people play, a game that involves a lot of listening and not so much fun.

Actual fun games though? The first one that comes to mind was a game we played where one person would start off as some how cursed and then, that cursed one, would have to spread that curse to everyone else by touching them in some way. Once that person had been touched by the original cursed person then they would join the side of the cursed ones and hunt the uncursed. There were two main strategies to the game, first was to hide, and if found, you ran. One tactic I enjoyed deploying was to wait for a cursed one to search an area then to go hide in the area behind their back after they had finished searching that area. It’s like using boredom as a hole to hide in. Once a person has categorised a place as safe they are at odds with the idea of it hiding their enemies, or not quite enemies, but the children they are hunting. Of course once the original cursed one had collected a critical massing of children this tactic was less effective as those new eyes would spoil it. Personally, I hated being picked as the first cursed one, I don’t know, it just seemed far less interesting than being pursued. As a hunter there’s a lot less skill to it, it’s all about being lucky, and in fact it is far more scary than being pursued. In fact I can’t remember a time when I was shocked as one of the uncursed, but plenty when I was shocked playing at being the cursed one. And that’s a strange thing, because I would have had nothing, within the confines of the game, to fear, but I always jumped the most when suddenly one of the uncursed would spring out and try and run. Although, saying all of that, yes there is definitely a satisfaction in cursing children. I say that because one always needs friends, even if one is doomed by random selection to be cursed and the only way to make friends is to curse them with one’s own touch. Like I said, such a sad predicament to find oneself cursed, much better to be uncursed and live with the uncertainty, or perhaps certainty, about what the future may hold for your eventual status. Death could be a kind of curse, but it isn’t. Death is more like a wave. Curses bounce around us by the resentment we bitterly cling to. When everything is taken from us it is resentment that remains. Children understand that resentment will be the last thing destroyed when humanity is put to rest. Maybe?

Another game? You’re really hacking at my hazelnuts here. Alright, well, there was this racing game. On the grazing lands, where the goats and cows got fat, there was this one old large tree. The tree itself was not sacred, but we separated that one tree out from all of the other trees. We weren’t allowed to take wood from it for burning or for building. It was fine, because we didn’t really need to build from it or use it for fire wood. That tree, the tree of separation, sometimes looked like a human being in my mind. Not that it was shaped physically like a human being, but that it came across that way. Similar to when you hear a noise that is not water splashing but sounds like water splashing. I guess, if you pushed it, the tree was part of our religious practice. It wasn’t like the rocks, because the rocks we considered to hold an actual power. The wood was less to do with power and more to do with representing something about ourselves as humans in a non-human pattern. This was ingrained in me as a different concept to the rock so much as to consider these two things in the same category is to miss the point of both or either, but let’s compare them anyway because it’s only a matter. I was told that rock is like rock whether you have taken it from the ocean of rock or leave it swimming free. Wood is not like this though. An ocean of wood becomes a tree and trees become woodland. Without the tree a piece of wood is dead, without the piece the tree can bleed like a person bleeds when that person is cut. Trees are a pattern of life themselves, that the category of life extends to them as much as it extends to me or you. That to kill wood for burning is an evil, but it is a necessary evil because of this World about us that creates frost and meat that tastes better cooked. To offset our guilt we must protect one of the trees and it must be maintained as part of our family grouping to maintain the life connection that people share with trees. Therefore the tree isn’t sacred, but the life pattern it shares with humans is the sacred part. Not that I really cared about any of that, it was just this was the tree where we started our racing game.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Technically I could play the racing game on my own, but I never did. I found it weird, slightly sad, to play the racing game on my own, the racing game was something that you wanted to do with other people. These people would exclusively be other children. We had a whole course set up, and you could do it in any order you wanted, back and forth, forth and back, round about and through. The important part was that everyone was taking the course in the same style at any given race. You’d start out at this tree and then there were a series of long and short hedgerows that were commonly used to shepherd the livestock. The up and around would usually be concerned with these hedgerows and the through would be the field that the hedgerows would create, minding not to run full pelt into any goats or cows grazing there at the time. That’s about it really, there were no real winners to the game, you sort of ran around like a mad sod and that was it. But the most important part of the running game was the character that you associated with during your participation in the run. That character would always be a non-human animal. We were all taught that animals had a life connection with us, and they also shared behavioural patterns. I can definitely see that as the case still. They show signs of feelings like fear and happiness. They turn up in our stories often and are useful in that regard as characters themselves. Killing an animal is also seen as a necessary evil, but, unlike trees, I think the animals probably have a porthole on that themselves. And maybe the ant doesn’t care for the cow, but the cow for sure cares about the cow.

Animals are interesting. Some of the children liked animals because they wanted to become a big strong hunter, like the stories. That was not where my mind paddled. Still, I’d try to blend in, but I didn’t take it as something integral to my formation as a living being. Despite this I did have a favourite animal to become. The fox of course, the fox on the course. Other creatures popularly selected would be birds, but never domesticated birds or geese for some reason. Oh, and nobody wanted to be an insect either, because I guess they’re kind of small and they die real easy. In fact usually if you wanted to insult someone that’s what you’d compare them to, so that was out of the equation. One of the boys always wanted to be the crow. He’d call himself the crow and he’d try and make the noises that crows make, also he had extremely dark hair which sort of made the whole deal more apt. Another animal to be was a stoat or a weasel, tricky customers to get a handle on. Rabbits and hares are another classic choice of ground critter. Badgers! And we’re not even really touching on the frogs, toads, and newts available. There are very many animals out there to discover. I almost forgot, because of they’re ubiquity, but domestic dogs, lots of them chosen as well. The other children loved to pretend to be a dog and would pant like them all the time.

Here’s the real one, the one everyone came to see, but will instead read. My very first interaction with the sexual endeavour. To call it an interaction, is maybe too strong of a word, but let me first describe the game that I was playing. You’d take two talus bones from a goat, and then you’d paint one black and leave the other one its original colour. The colour of one of your teeth, if you wanted to know. This bone has quite a unique shape in its cuboid structure. It’s not quite a cube because it is elongated slightly on the sides. The game is to throw both the two together, the black and the original coloured one, and get them to land on the same side as each other. When this act of unison had occurred that would be the game taking place, and when it didn’t occur that would be a failure for the game to take hold and you’d throw again. But you see if the black one was farthest away from the thrower and both of the two bones aligned on the shorter edge of their shapes then that would be the game being even more of the game. In that sense, you can clearly see, that the game took place in the moments between the release and the landing of the bones, much in that same way the majesty of a bird is seen in their same moments. Looking back now it would seem that the actual point of this game was to gather my attentions. My entire Universe of things would sometimes squeeze up in to flipping those bones, and as intended, because it would perturb me from interrupting the physical relations occurring in my particular vicinity. Despite these intentions I did stumble upon and hear a lot of endeavours as a course of my young life. And maybe, to be fair, the game wasn’t completely a matter of distraction. Now I am no expert, but certain things stayed firmly put in my mind. Nakedness for instance, that is a key element of sex. You have to take off your clothes in some way if you wish to partake in suchness. You have to get comfortable, that’s something that I noticed could be an issue. Trances, the whole thing always appeared to be done in some manner of trance, which you do not want to disturb. Oh and the animals, don’t forget the animals and the noises a person must borrow from them in these occasions. Then all of that fun, it stops very awkwardly, and between nakedness and the reclothing there it happens. To go back to the game, it was good to pretend I was doing something other than snooping, it didn’t really matter whether you won or not. You win and then you throw. You lose and then you throw. But, even then, you wanted to win.