Cages by Chris Pasley

Author:Chris Pasley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-10-07T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

“Curse words are a good example,” Remi lectured. “They’re meaningless. What makes a swear word? What makes a word ‘bad’? I can say sex, but that’s not bad. But say the really good word for it, and it’s like I killed a kitten. I’m describing the exact same act. What makes it okay to say ‘poop’ but not the better four-letter-word for it?”

I sighed. Remi was on his fourth ageism lecture of the day, his voice echoing through the metal so that each word phased badly. “I don’t care, Remi.”

“It’s because the word isn’t about the act. It’s about emphasis. Adults keep these words to themselves because they’re powerful. Nothing is as emphatic as the F-word. Nothing. They use it to make their sentences more powerful, more meaningful. ‘Hand me the crowbar’ lacks the urgency and threat that ‘hand me the fucking crowbar’ has.”

I sat up. “So adults refuse to let kids swear because they don’t want them emphasizing things too much? I don’t buy it.”

“You should. Words are powerful, Sam. Polite speech gets stuck in the filters. Adults know how to ignore it, how to parse it, how to tune it out. But when you use a word that powerful it breaks all their filters down. There’s too much ‘emotional content,’ as Bruce Lee used to say.”

“What?”

“Pre-Outbreak movie star. Read an article about him in a magazine once. The point is that when kids are restricted to polite speech, they’re giving up their power to emphasize. Only adults can mean something so urgently and meaningful. They want to keep us quiet and powerless.”

I laid back down. I hated it when Remi started to make sense.

Prisoners have chronicled time’s ability to lose coherency in lockup for centuries. A prisoner knows that time is a mutable thing, speeding up or slowing arbitrarily on some quantum tide.

Lying there in that tiny cell I knew that time was not a fixed constant. Some days passed by in an instant, the lights flicking on and off in what seemed like only hours. But most days seemed to want to take their time, sloughing through a morass of rants from Remi, who seemed to take sustenance from railing at authority, the bored drone of the Bell Teacher who came in and gave us abbreviated lectures and homework assignments, and the piercing shrieks of Susan at all hours.

She was consistent and persistent in the way only the insane seem to have the energy for. One hour she would needle me about being a lying son of a bitch who broke her friend’s heart, the next she’d be thundering down prophecies of demons, fire and brimstone. Most of the time she said the exact same things over and over, so that my only course of action was to jam my pillow in my ears in the farthest corner of my cell, by the toilet. Conyers couldn’t have crafted a better torture.

Mostly, though, I spent my time thinking about my family.

James had been a mysterious figure in my life until I was five.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.