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Sport 41: 2013

VIIIRat Stew

VIII      Rat Stew

None of us were being oppressed right here, right now. Not even really us women. Of course there was still wage disparity and glass ceilings and lots of other stuff but I felt more equal to any guy in that country than anywhere else I’d been on the planet and sometimes I didn’t even want to be that equal! All that responsibility for your own life. Sometimes I just wanted to be told what to do so that when it all went to custard I could blame someone else and demand to be allowed to vote, say that if they’d let me vote to start with, none of this would ever have happened. So what the hell did we know about oppression and running for your life in abject terror? All I knew was what I’d read in books. All I knew was that we all sell everyone out at the end. That’s human nature and all that. Your mother, your most dearly beloved, your lifelong friend. Someone’ll say, ‘I smell a rat’; you’ll go, ‘Yep, that’s dinner, nah, just jokes, it’s me’; and promptly trade your sweetheart for a bowl of rodent stew or something nasty. If you haven’t already, you’ll sell your body, your children. Or eat them. We are all capable of the worst if pressed. If pressured. If in dire enough straits. That was all I knew. From books. And I didn’t even know if it was true.