A Sick Gray Laugh by Nicole Cushing

Author:Nicole Cushing
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Word Horde
Published: 2019-07-26T03:06:30+00:00

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At this point, I have written over forty thousand words. Some of them may have led you to consult your dictionary. For example, very early on I took the risk of throwing “effluvium” at you. That is probably my favorite word of all time, with “desultory” coming in at a close second. I’ll admit it: I love the sound made when the consonants in such words jangle against their vowels. But I didn’t use either of them as mere decoration. Both were necessary to describe certain properties of Foulness.

That said, I promised you far more than a description of Foulness. I said I would explain why Grayness arose. And to explain why it arose, I don’t need any ten-dollar words. I can sum it up in a single, simple one: “compromises.”

Yes, I’m beginning to suspect that compromises are the fertile ground in which the seed of Grayness grows. When did Naumpton start to succumb to Grayness? The seed hovered over the town after the deforestation bubble burst, but it didn’t land until the Brides compromised their faith and joined the mainstream.

And that was only the most dramatic of the compromises. There are a hundred and one other compromises that followed on the heels of it. There are the compromises that individuals must make simply as a result of dwelling in close proximity to others—the subtle compromise of self-consciousness about how our appearance and actions impact others. (Even if someone dresses in a manner intended to shock passers-by, the very act of guessing how others will react is a compromise of true individualism.) There are also the compromises that the human spirit makes when molded by an established cultural infrastructure. That is, molded by civilization.

As Naumpton developed into something other than a frontier town, something with institutions and stability and proper land titles rather than the flimsy claims of squatters, the population swelled. As more children came into the area, education became compulsory.

Newspapers, radio shows, pulp magazines, and dime novels began to define the boundaries of what was thinkable, believable, sayable, and doable. It’s as if the variety of human experience was suddenly (radically) condensed into three or four stylized types. People stopped defining themselves by their instincts and began to define themselves in reference to pop culture.

This is, of course, a trend that continues unabated up to this present day. People fill out online surveys to find out which member of the Golden Girls (or the Beatles, or the Scooby Doo cast) they are. Some of you are probably annoyed at me for bringing this up, as you hold that these surveys are harmless fun.

But (here comes my pessimism again) I see it as a sign of our distressing neediness, of our deference to popular entertainment. We don’t want to do the work of finding our identities through trial and error. We want to be told who we are. Can I really be the only one who finds that mildly servile?

And isn’t servility an ingredient in Grayness? There’s a sort of Servile Gray Restlessness (S.

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