Plastic Gods

Here I am, stumbling along the dusty road, encountering a litany of conflicts. Woe is me. Pity me. Everyone needs to feel sorry for me because life is not easy. I alone deserve everyone’s sympathetic attention. Everyone needs to stop what they’re doing and tell me I am so strong and so brave.

Fuck all your problems. Mine are more important. It’s nice to be so sure of something and snuggle up warm under the covers with unknitted brows and an unknotted conscience. My problems are the tiptop most worstest anyone’s ever experienced and golly gosh darn it, I am the center of everything.

Ten thousand miles away in a gathering storm, a young girl lies beside a frozen river, dying. Her parents, aunts and uncles are dead. She holds her dead little brother against her and shivers uncontrollably.

Her face is burnt by the wind and her lips are cracked. She isn’t crying anymore; she’s all cried out. Now, there’s only one thought in her mind, one feeling, a feeling of sadness that no one will know that she died.