Another Novel Idea so Please let me know what you think of this prologue:
Lies are bitter things. Pellets of piercing, malign malice.
As a child, lies were petty and insignificant; lies about a square of chocolate
or a Crayola star on the magnolia walls. In the years betwixt ages I considered
them just as inferior to other principles of life. In the hazy fun, the
seemingly endless summers of young adolescence lies were as everything else
was. Non-existent. That was until I was old enough to understand. Old enough to
comprehend. I knew that things had
happened as I grew up, but never why.
Not until I understood lies. You see, lies are these interesting creatures;
brimming with enmity and lust for sanity. You don’t see them at first, latching
onto your shoulders or burrowing into the nerves; you only notice once they’ve
finished macheting their way into your consciousness and have nested there.
When they line your thoughts with ire and your limbs with led. They paint your
thoughts with acid and feed you ricin. What would you do, honestly; if lies
were the core of your existence, your family? Do you think you’d confront,
hide. Kill?
When I was
six, my mum built a room of books. A fortress of literature, coiled in there
were the distant whispers of the greats; musings of Dickens and mutterings of
Tolstoy. She hid away in there. To withdraw from the world. The problem was she
took me with her in the reclusion. I was to be the witness to the demise. She
was her own judge, jury and executioner and I was merely looking on, through
the looking-glass. Utterly paralysed, as we all are in childhood; paralysed by
ignorance. Each day was a concatenation of desolate events, each separate and
isolated; only interconnected by their fractious pains. She would sit there, a
sculptured bird; not the accipitrine creature she used to resemble, no longer a
magnificent goshawk circling the skies; anthropomorphic. She was now a finch,
desperately flapping her flailing wings in her self-induced twilight. To a six
year old, this catatonia was utterly inexplicable. To any other human the
misery would have been palpable, but to my immature eyes it was simply odd. A
metallic tang at the end of each day, a frost in the air that practically
sublimed oxygen to a foil of sea-fog. If nurture is the supposed key to a child’s
mental development, perhaps that was the first clue. That growing within a cave
of stale narcissism was the first seed to germinate inside me, the first drop
of antipathy to flourish.
