Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

“What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?”

They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.

Could that senile slut of a nun have broken her word after all these years and told the girl the truth?

It’s funny, in a dingy way, that I make my little living by reading. I have to smile because I used to avoid reading. It scared me.

It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.

Grownups can deal with scraped knees, dropped ice-cream cones, and lost dollies, but if they suspected the real reasons we cry they would fling us out of their arms in horrified revulsion. Yet we are small and as terrified as we are terrifying in our ferocious appetites.

We survive until, by sheer stamina, we escape into the dim innocence of our own adulthood and its forgetfulness.

The hope you get from religion is a three-ring, all-star hope because the risk is outrageous.

We were all nervy with an unspoken anticipation. We were accelerating toward something and we didn’t know what.

Just being visible is my biggest confession, so they try to set me at ease by revealing our equality, by dragging out their own less-apparent deformities.

If all these pretty women could shed the traits that made men want them (their prettiness) then they would no longer depend on their own exploitability but would use their talents and intelligence to become powerful.

I fantasized marching legions of angry women in high heels and bulging blouses.

“Hey, it’s good. Doc P. is happy. I’d like it myself. I’d put myself to sleep only there’s nobody to do my job.”