On my way there, I passed the usual sights. Benny, a local vagrant who panhandles at the corner of the highway exit ramp near my condo complex, waved to me as I pulled up to the light. I rolled down the window of my 2008 Toyota Prius, and heavy Portland summer air hit me in the face like a pillow straight out of the microwave. "Hey, Benny," I squinted and smiled. He grinned back, proudly showing the gaps of his missing teeth. "It's hot out here, you must be dying! Tell you what, when I come back this way, I want you to stop over at my place and get yourself a shower. OK?" Benny was speechless. His lip quivered and he fell to his knees, bobbing his head like a Benzo withdrawal-ee. Tears streamed down his ruddy cheeks as I reached out the window to pat him on the shoulder. To me, it wasn't even an issue. I'm so fucking unbelievably nice and awesome to everyone, it was just another of many random acts of kindness. "See you then!" I said as I took my foot off the brake. The light had been green for a few seconds but the guy behind me had probably seen my "COEXIST" bumper sticker (with all the different religious symbols for letters), and decided not to honk.
It took awhile for the orphans to get the hang of grilling the zucchini, even though it's pretty easy. I have to say, I love the heck out of those kids, but God damn, some of them are stupid. I guess not everyone has the benefit of dual degrees in Anthropology and Theater Arts. Take the example of Dirty Mike Jr., whose dad robbed a gas station and got shivved in prison the day before his first parole hearing. This little asshole just would not stop giving me lip about my "faggy hair." Can I help it that when the humidity hits, I have to use a lot of gel? And he didn't even want to try the summer squash. But with my endless reserves of patience for the brash offenses of youth, I held back my tears and endured. The rest of the kids, I think, learned a lot. Like how they could twist the little knob on top of the pepper grinder to make the grind finer or coarser. That's going to be really useful to them when they're out there in the real world! I went to a top-notch private liberal arts/culinary prep school to learn how to do that shit, and they were learning it for free. Eat your heart out, Gandhi.
I got home with Benny in tow a few hours later. He went straight for the bathroom and I knew he'd probably be in there for awhile. Although I had a tentative appointment to donate blood at the nearby Unitarian church, I didn't really want to leave Benny alone in my apartment. It's not that I didn't trust him, but last time I let him stop in to use my toilet, I later discovered that all my expensive Bay lime beard oil had gone missing. And I'm not saying he took it, but I sort of think that he might have. Some people say I'm too trusting, but hey, if he didn't need it more than me, he wouldn't have taken it, right? So instead of leaving, I sat down to play some Haven & Hearth. Little did I know, on the other side of the world, someone else was also sitting down to play Haven & Hearth. Someone with whose... uh, s-someone who's... someone whose... path and, uh, mine... would... er, inter... uh, someone I was gonna meet real soon.
Using my boundless intuition and a dose of imagination, I can put together the scene in my head. His name is Pyotr or Vladimir or some shit like that, and he's squatting in his gran's musty root cellar under the feeble light of a single naked bulb. He's perched on a rickety stack of wooden Vodka cases and hunched over an old, faded red Agat-4 keyboard cratered with cigarette burns. A few patchy wisps of neckbeard dust the lapels of his track suit collar. Sucking his teeth, he groans "cyka блять" repeatedly while rocking back and forth. His entire body itches and craves release... but first, he needs to grief someone. Logging into the game, he equips his Swastika-emblazoned shield, grabs a sword someone else made, hops on a horse named LIGALIZE and rides out from his ugly palisaded parking lot to traverse the stump-studded wasteland around his homely home. He's emboldened by the recent release of a patch that encourages players to dick around outside talking to trees and rocks and shit. This opportunist wants to capitalize on a hilariously misnomered "design space" development that seeks to turn a whole world full of rightly agoraphobic shut-ins into stark raving lunatics traipsing through the wilderness shouting at inanimate objects and starting forest fires while being rewarded with magic-induced gastric irrigation.
"Oh no, I'm dead!" My friend and companion Saskia said over party chat. "Someone just rode up and killed me!" This was a complete and utter shock to me. Who would want to attack us? We had so little of value. And just earlier that day, I had been wishing that Haven & Hearth had little orphan Hearthlings you could adopt, since it would be such a wonderful addition to the game to be able to help the less fortunate. I instantly started to feel sick. My heart was pounding as I groped for some explanation and an appropriate response. At the time, I was guiding a poor stray auroch back to our house, so I could tame it and nurse it back to health, then perhaps donate it to another player. I'd fed it a nice clover, gently looped the rope around its neck and was patiently leading it along the river from my humble rowboat when I got the alarm. "He's gone inside!" I heard. Maybe I'd have a chance. Heartbroken at having to abandon the bushy bovine, I rowed to the mouth of our little bay and cautiously approached the homestead. Finding the exterior deserted, I rummaged through my inventory and the pots and urns artfully arranged outside our door for something with which to arm myself. I strapped a shield to one spindly arm and gripped a dull sword I could barely lift, and grimly made my way inside to confront the murderer. Saskia was dead, and I saw little point to toiling on alone. Even if I died, I would be glad to strike a blow to this ruffian!
I didn't stand a fucking chance. He had IP on me before the interior even loaded, and the choleric Cossack cut right through my dinky q20 bronze armor like slicing into a tub of rancid Korall. My last words, had I the breath to utter them, would have been "Kill me, but spare the animalsssuurgh..." but alas. Before I even hit the ground, he hauled me up onto the greasy shoulders of his garish purple robe and took me outside, dumping my carcass on a slope overlooking the claim. This was where I was able to witness the heinous acts that followed.
Firstly, he brought his infantile wrath down upon the pretty little gates of our trellis-fenced animal pens. Not even bothering to open them, he bashed them away to release the animals when he'd finished rudely palpating their genitals. The vines of the pea and cucumber plants clinging to the trellises snagged futilely at the childish churl's blood-soaked blade. While the livestock were left to wander in confusion, several feral auroch and mouflon grazing peacefully at their hitching posts by the shore nearby were not so lucky. Before our untimely deaths, Saskia and I had high hopes for these beasts of burden. Indeed, every merciless beating we'd given them on the path to domestication had been swiftly followed by our soothing reassurance of a healthy and productive life on our happy little farm. But Instead of letting them escape, this gutless aggressor slaughtered the lot of them. For what purpose, I can only speculate. I imagine it may have marginally increased the circulation to his tiny penis.
After putrefying our home and yard with the stink of his malign, the marauder again heaved my lifeless remains up by the scruff of my hide cloak. It was only now that I saw the symbol on his shield: a series of lines crudely scrawled on middle school bathroom stalls all over the world. This icon gave me an inkling of insight into the mind of this puerile pugilist who had interrupted our ultimately inconsequential lives. He swiveled around and stood motionless for a moment, and from above, I witnessed myself whisked to a desolate and unfamiliar place. It was a bland, unaesthetic and ineptly constructed tower scratched up from the grounds of a pathetic little spit of land surrounded by palisades. The yard looked like the porch set of Deliverance. Despite my condition, I felt sorry for anyone who lived there. I was too sad to even take a screenshot.
Gaining entrance to the tower, my killer carried my corpse upstairs. Some sort of bumbling, clubfooted savage had arranged what little furniture they had. There were cupboards placed seemingly at random, shoved away from the walls. The floor was littered with the skeletons of dozens of other Hearthlings. I supposed I would simply be deposited there and left to rot, denied any chance of a proper burial. But it seemed the abductor of my Hearthly remains had other plans for them. He twitched fitfully in place, his body inching closer to mine, rotating. I'd seen far too many retarded children at the orphanage fumble at their computers to not know what was happening. He was lining himself up. He was probably rubbing one grimy digit down the crusty rind of his mousewheel, zooming the camera in. Still, it took a moment to register. It didn't dawn on me until he went motionless. Then I realized... he was masturbating. This poor, sick adolescent was jerking off to the image on his dingy monitor, of his cartoonish character standing over my dead body. Predictably, it was over in seconds. He stumbled towards the stairs, leaving my violated cadaver alone in the bone-strewn attic of that stodgy tower.
In a daze, I clicked "Move on." Again taking the form of a little ball of light, I meandered around the dark and silent woods. I crossed the stream and was made flesh. When I got to the wizard, he asked my name.
I sat there staring at the screen.
Then I typed "I forgive you."
I looked at the fire in contemplation.
Instead of walking into it, I moved my mouse cursor to the upper right, and closed the window.
-64,-100
