“Abandon parents and cause them misery” was a plan thought of one the course of several days.

Being a child was inconvenient for a variety of reasons. People thought less of you, spoke in a baby voice and were generally a hindrance.

Most of the problems applied to people. My parents seemed rather doting, which had quickly become annoying.

“Open wide,” my mother commanded in Low. I opened my mouth as wide as possible. Unfortunately, as a baby my mouth was quite small, so my mother struggled to put all of the bland meat stew in.

The wooden spoon tilted, sending stew across my fur onesie. Fuck.

“Aww, did the baby spill their (stew?)” she cooed in Low. I wasn’t quite sure what that last word had been, but I was sure it was some kind of stew. In this world, there seemed to be a different name for every kind of stew.

Annoyance prickled on my skin. What kind of mother blames their child for what they spilled?!

Well… one that knows her child wouldn’t understand…

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I was already two years old, but I hadn’t talked at all. Multiple times I had seen my parents express concern about how long I was taking, but this was all due to a miscalculation on my part.

The language of this world was complex, to put it lightly. There were two main forms of the language. Well technically three.

Form one was known as Low. Low was what you used in everyday life, from the market to your house. Pretty simple stuff.

The other form was called High. High was the more polite version, used essentially never except when you wanted to butter someone up.

Low sounded rather grating and harsh, though my mother managed to make it sound soft. High was softer, though it kept the key guttural sound of the language.

As for the third form…

Two people burst into the spacious tepee we lived in. Between them they held a stretcher.

In the stretcher was my father bleeding out from his missing arm.

One of the men holding the stretcher cried, “Fuck! (mother’s name?), help us! (father’s name?) is dying!” Interestingly, the man used Curse form.

Curse form existed as a ubiquitous swear word for every word in the dictionary. I could see the usage of saying ‘fuck’ in Curse, but why would you need to say ‘table?’ Plus, you could say ‘fuck’ in the other forms as well, so it was pretty pointless.

My one pet peeve with the language was the fact that there was no correlation between the languages. ‘Table’ in High didn’t sound like ‘table’ in Low. There were no roots, just pure nonsense.

Though, as I sat there thinking about the intricacies of language, you might think me callous. After all, my father is dying right now.

Well… is he?

I suppose it’s time to talk about my family.