I.
Of the people I can truly say I respect - not my parents of course, birthright doesn’t necessarily required respect - Prof Allen stood the highest. Her works, for lack of a better descriptor, revived desolated, barren wasteland that was our country’s literary scene. She got the brain, the looks, and such a sensitivity that it seems like her nerves were outside of her skin. On walks with her, she would intentionally choose streets that are known to be homeless-less, else she would empty her wallet for any one of them.
To us young writers, Prof Allen was as strict as can be, and she requested, demanded in our work a “human:” only pieces that scream work ethics, dedication, and sacrifice, along with the prose of course. So, friendship with Prof Allen was rough naturally, but my respect for her stands.
Of all the times I was frustrated with work, with putting in that required dedication, I would look to Prof Allen for questions, especially on how or who got her to be the way she is. Once, she would answer:
- My father was Mutt. Throughout his short life, all he wished was to be human. Alas, it was unattainable.
From the conversation, I came up with the following story.
II.
Mutt knew Death was approaching in minutes. His legs were cold, and the cold was spreading upward. He knew when it reached his heart, it was over, the end, a bye-bye to life.
Mutt opened his mouth to gasp. He could feel Death, weighing down on him, crushing his lungs, and sticking his invisible, black tongues, curling it around Mutt’s heart.
Years ago, they found Mutt next to a sewer grate on the outskirt of town. The grate had long stopped working, filled up by garbage. Mutt was one of them. He should have been dead, but he wasn’t. Someone saved him, a beggar called Joe.
Joe was usually seen around the market, but that day for some reasons he was at the outskirt, next to wear Mutt was moaning and crying. Under the muted light of dusk, and the screeching wind, Mutt’s cries must have been straight out of a horror movie. Joe wasn’t afraid of no humans, he could only hate or love them. But ghost, he was terrified of. It was a relief to Joe that it was only an ugly kid. Mutt was cold to the touch.
Joe took him back to his tent near the market, and named him Mutt. Clearly, it was no name for a kid, but Joe hadn’t seen a kid so ugly: his head was three time the size of his, his hands and legs flopped around like noodles, seemingly boneless, and his eyes. His eyes were… too beautiful, too perfectly round. It was exactly those eyes that kept him and Joe alive: none could walk pass him without giving a penny or two. Joe was making more than a year’s worth of begging, simply by placing Mutt in front of a crowd. Mutt’s eyes will then do the work. They would ask:
- Please, men and women. Have sympathy, spare a thought, for one who isn’t.
And Joe would feed Mutt, either corn or stale rice, like a farmer feeding his chicken. Joe didn’t love Mutt, he got a lot to do, just as anyone else in their world. In his world, the beggar’s world, he had to, MUST, drink and gamble. He couldn’t care less for the little sickly boy, or how hungry he was sometimes, or how cold it was on the ground he laid. In the beggar’s world, a little kid, blood-related or not, was nothing more than a tool. If he was a good tool, he was kept. If he wasn’t, he was to be thrown away like any other worthless tool. Back to the sewer grate with the garbage they go. Without money, there was little sense in humanity.
Still, Mutt grew, and was increasingly more aware of his won predicament. There was a War going on, and the market has long been obliterated and raided. Mutt and Joe was now each in their own sack, the big ones they used to store seeds. Joe coughed up blood.
- Mutt, you’ve grown, and I’m dying. Soon, you won’t be able to rely on me anymore. Well, you never have anyway. We rely on each other, to live like the cockroaches. To live. Oh how all I wanted for us to be humans.
Mutt listened, but caring not for his pleads. Mutt was used to this, so he sighed, and pulled the sack higher over his head. Mutt’s been begging for so long, so long that he was no longer surprise by the world of man. The uncaring, unloving, hateful world of man. Mutt wasn’t Man.
III.
I rushed to Prof Allen after the story. I wanted her approval, her praise, for I’ve dedicated. Her face paled as her eyes scanned the page.
- How dare you?
She threw the piece of paper at me.
- Why do you lie in your writings? Realism is important. Reality is different, can’t you see? Do you know who my Father is?
She scrimmaged through a drawer in the living room, and picked out a picture.
- This is him, my Father. This is Mutt!
In the picture, a rotund man in a suit and black pants was smiling back at me.