About the Author; Meta-fiction.

There once was a girl, with the gift of Sight.

The lives of many were open, to her, like a book free to be perused.

The beginning, middle, end, and the epilogue.

When the world is full of stories, it is natural and human to want to read the one unavailable to you. That one elusive tome, filled with secrets and wonders that you already know the gist of, deep down, but you have never read in full.

There once was a girl, with the gift of Sight, who was incapable of Seeing into herself. Her own beginning, middle, and end. Her epilogue.

When the option was presented…

When the novel, placed before her…

How was she to resist opening it?

The Story of Yi, Epilogue.

On the day of her trial, she walked away as a free woman.

The law may not have been on her side, but right and reason had been. That was why she had been able to struggle free, to run. She’d slipped down, hidden underneath a grate, slashed at the ankles of her guards with a sharp, jagged piece of metal she’d found among the refuse.

She dragged them into the sewers with her, and cut one of their judgemental eyes from their faces.

She wanted them to still see, so that when she cut her own flesh and pressed the fragile orb into her skin, they could see the product of her work. They would see their own, condemnatory eye staring back at them from within her stomach, or thigh.

Those eyes, half-healed into her body, were the last thing so many people ever saw.

And that is how Yi’s story began.

The Story of Yi, Part 2.

When she was old enough, Yi was shown a different way to make money. She had to earn her keep, the adults insisted, and she had little more than her looks.

Luckily, people would pay a good amount of money for her looks, even if they were marred by a ruined eye and a permanent bruise.

Less luckily…no one had told Yi that was she was doing wasn’t legal. She didn’t know to ask the well-to-do gentleman whether or not they were officers, or to let them lead – to leave herself loopholes.

She was taken to prison, charged with prostitution, and no one came to bail her.

Yi couldn’t understand that. The police were wrong, to have arrested her; she was only doing as she was told, and trying to bring in enough money to make ends meet. Her arguments fell on deaf ears, and her pleas ignored entirely.

Her family was wrong, too; family didn’t let their own be locked behind bars, though when it came to living in a cell, there was no real difference to her home life that she could pinpoint. There was no privacy, always someone watching… Just like home.

In both places, she was powerless.

But here, there was one difference that it took some time for Yi to latch to. Before her was a world of ‘right’. There was no family, no love. Right and wrong, fair and unfair… Love was the divisive line between those concepts, and her perception of love had always been skewed.

Using the plastic cutlery from the dining hall, her cell mate’s ankles and wrists were cut through, tied by the hair to her bedpost. She was wrong, Yi had decided, to be looking at her with so much judgement and hate, when she had committed crimes not even for survival’s sake! She knew what her cellmate’s conviction was. Assault, against a former lover – low and disgusting.

Yi’s court date was set, and she was moved to solitary confinement…but even alone, she could feel herself being judged by those who were so much more wrong than she.

She could feel their eyes, permeating concrete walls.

The Story of Yi, Part 1.

This story was ignored by the people whose jobs it was to notice.

Yi was three years old when she took a blow to the face – the belt buckle was sharp, hard, and brought down with such viciousness that the resulting bruise would never fade. The blood vessels had been burst, damaged beyond repair, and her vision through her right eye was never quite the same.

Had she not been living in a one-bedroom apartment with a brother and sister – which one was her biological parent, she would never find out – perhaps someone would have taken her into custody. Her aunt, or mother, was primarily charged with her care, and the resentment was prominent in her treatment of the child.

It was tense, and Yi learned to take in the atmosphere before she even learned to read or right. A drug deal that had gone south meant that a flogging was unavoidable; her father, or uncle, favoured fists and open-handed smacks, while the woman liked to have something in hand that could cut Yi’s child-soft flesh.

She had to sleep on the living room couch, and her clothes were heaped in a corner. She had to be quick, when dressing herself; there was no privacy, and the doors were very rarely locked, for business reasons. People sometimes walked right in when she was half-undressed, hardly announcing their presence, and Yi would inadvertently alert every apartment down the hall that they had visitors with a surprised shriek.

The two adults didn’t bring in much income, and had they cared, they would have found out that Yi could have been enrolled in school for free. As it was, they took it upon themselves to teach her the skills they decided were most valuable.

She knew her math well. Monetary values were important; milligrams to grams, and the delicate chemical balance of those measurements, were important too. Yi’s reading came along more slowly; she only really needed to recognize the basic characters that formed client names.

Once she was old enough – the adults decided that age was ten years old – they included other aspects to her home-schooling. Where the tendons on a human body are, and where they can be slashed to incapacitate. How deeply to cut, to keep someone from bleeding out. A dead man couldn’t pay, the man cautioned. A living one could go to the police, the woman warned.

That would incite screaming matches between the two, but on a few things, they agreed. The police were not there to serve and protect. They would not protect Yi; the law was a selfish construct, and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ fell firmly within shades of grey that the selfish brutes of the police force refused to understand. They were small-minded, sometimes cruel.

Right meant protecting family from jail. Family meant love, no matter how they screamed, how they hit her…

And love was always right. Survival was always right.

The Meaning of an Epilogue.

Epilogues are an odd thing.

The story sometimes doesn’t seem complete without the addition of one, yet the author made a decision to have the tale ‘end’. Aside from the passage of time, what makes an epilogue different from any other chapter of the story?

Is an epilogue meant to give the reader closure? The mere presence of one implies that the story’s ‘end’ wasn’t truly a full-stop. Now the reader knows that there are more consequences, more points to the plot and to the character development, more words lined up into sentences they will never see.

The epilogue is a paradox. A conclusion, to pointedly display that there is no conclusion.

There is no end, and thus no peace of mind. Thus, no peace at all.

The Story of Alexander, Epilogue.

The computer was dismantled. The Internet router – which had been discarded – found, and similarly taken apart.

It took some time, and more brainpower than he had ever exerted, to figure out how not to bleed out when slitting open his veins and tethering them to wires. How to fuse metal to his fingertips without damaging the circuitry – he sacrificed the nerve endings to do it.

To live in the world he wanted, he had to become a physical part of it. Have it be a part of him.

The thin skin of his eyelid was cut, his corneas peeled away…and when he could see again, it was through the screen of an LED monitor.

And that is how Alexander’s story began.

The Story of Alexander, Part 2.

The only people ‘like him’, he found online.

His grandparents were reluctant to get him a computer, but the insistence of his teachers that his assignments be submitted in tidy, computer-typed printed pages meant that they had no other choice. His grandfather attempted to drive him back and forth between the library and home, but his eyesight had begun to worsen and the risk of losing his driver’s license was becoming more and more real.

First, the computer; a printer, an Internet connection. Alexander was allotted only a few hours a day, of computer time – his grandmother had heard dreadful things, about today’s youth spending all their time in front of a screen, becoming mindless. Their boy wouldn’t get caught up in those video games – nothing but time-wasters. They had a driven young man, one who was going places.

Alexander didn’t spend his time on his assignments. His grades began to suffer, as he instead found other things to do. Little pockets of comfortable socialization; there was no face-to-face, no one being loud or grabby. People who typed out their thoughts in long paragraphs, composed their arguments – no matter how inane the contents of those arguments were – and called him a friend.

He could be honest. He could be blunt. He could plainly state how he was feeling and ask for the same information back, because there were no facial cues to incorrectly read. Everyone was on an even playing field.

What was more, he found that the talents he had were better applied, in his online world. Games that could be played to test the limits of his imagination, coordination, reflexes. He could create those games, himself, with only a few hundred lines of code.

His grandparents noticed, in time. His punishment was to be cut off from his world.

They physically monitored his computer usage, disconnected their Internet connection. He was cut off from his friends. Separated from the world in which he’d built a place for himself.

Had they not raised a driven young man, perhaps he would have buckled and broken. He may have bowed his head, and gone back to his lessons and his schooling. He might have tried to cope.

But a driven young man could not let matters lie.