Fiction

Fiction

It’s empowering to know what I do. Isn’t it absurd how little nuggets of information can change where you’ll end up living. If you can call prison ‘living’. I don’t know if you can. But then again, I wouldn’t actually know about that. I always smile when I think this. Not that I am not aware of the perceived ‘horror’ of prison life, but I imagine the situation would work in my favour, if I was to end up there. You may see this as arrogance, but I suppose you are entitled to your opinion.
And by saying this, it does not mean to say that I do not care about anyone’s opinion, in fact the reverse is true. But the identity of the opinion holder is all that matters. And yours does not. Shame really, because I would actually quite like to tell you how it came to be that I am sitting here, basking in the embers of my own mischievousness. Maybe that is the wrong lexical choice. Or maybe it isn’t. The ‘severity’ of a person’s actions is entirely subjective. What may be deemed utterly unacceptable in one city, may be renowned as permissible in another. So the consequences of our actions are entirely dependent on our location.
It isn’t like I am a person that cannot be weighed down and sunk… like the hope of a downtrodden child pining for approval from a distant parent. But it is not, as is the case for most people, guilt that weighs me down. I think, and you may agree, that guilt is an abstract concept anyway. I think you’d be intrigued to hear about how I’ve perused away my hours, where I’ve been. And where she is, or was, or will be. I’m not going to give anything away just yet, even the choice of tense I use to detail another character can give away the plot. Emphasis on character because the narration of fiction always includes this word. What intrigues me, perhaps not you as you won’t have considered this, is how there is always a generic assumption present—that characters remain fictitious. Whoever concluded that the tantalising hints a narrative slips in are anything but what has actually been experienced? Who surmised that the perfect crime cannot be hidden behind a collection of adverbs?

Maria Vegro