And Then I Woke Up

by Malcolm Devlin

Night means darkness, darkness means introspection, introspection dredges up all kinds of monsters and my god, do those bastards keep us busy until dawn.

so true

Isn’t it beautiful how stories can work like that? The subtle way they help the teller, the subversive way they reach the listener, how they creep inside you like waking dreams.

When the narrative has taken hold, it brings with it a constricting of focus; a tendency to only see what is perceived to be true at the expense of everything else.

They liked the weapons she had forged herself; they couldn’t stand the way she chose to wield them.

The crazy stuff was already sneaking in by then. Little cracks in the societal structure everyone stepped over with a little skip rather than stopping to figure out how to resolve.

But by punctuating one sentence so decisively, she had only made room for another one.

When the dominant narrative started to snowball, the infection short-circuited our reason. It drip-fed us confirmation bias. It took the lie and weaponised it.

A certain sort of vulnerability to look at someone, a group of people and think: monster, zombie, Other.

Like so much of the world, they had carried on oblivious to the way I had filtered them from my existence.

As a species, we like to rank ourselves. We are better than them; they have more than us.

The higher we climb, the further we fall.

History is one long string of stories honed to sharpen one side over another.

by three that afternoon I had murdered my son and my husband and fled the house we called our home.