The Deadly Truth

I manually squirted my shampoo into my palm. Begrudgingly thinking, if I had a Mone I wouldn’t even need to do this anymore. I squeezed the bottle dry in my anger. My father was so cheap. With each squeeze, I thought Cheap, cheap, cheap. Even Lanai had a Mone. She didn’t even need one. Her maids already did everything for her, from brushing her teeth to her complimenting her every waking move. I was the one who needed a Mone. Cheap, cheap, cheap.

“Hey, Sarna, could you finish up there? I have to go,” I heard my father yelling down from the first floor. Still angry with his stinginess, I shouted back “Why don’t you use the fourth floors?” I looked down to notice that not even a drop was left in my Coconut wash. My palm had the slimy substance seeping through the cracks in my fingers. I groaned and threw the bottle out of the shower. My hands forever smelled of coconut after.

“You know I can’t make it up those stairs with these legs,” I rolled my eyes. If we had gotten that elevator installed in when they were on sale, he wouldn’t need to. Too bad we couldn’t have an old-styled home, but those are basically extinct, since there’s no space left for them. Now all the houses are compact and tall. Many building companies’ slogans revolve around the words “All that’s left is up!”

“Fine. Whatever. Just give me a second,” I called and pressed my palm up against the wall to turn off the water. I stepped out carefully and pressed 7896 on the digit pad with sticky coconut scented fingers so the air would suck my hair dry. After a quick gush I slipped on my mother’s old sweater and a pair of jeans.

“You can have it,” I told him as I passed by, careful to hide my hands from him. I almost got away from him when he turned around.

“Hands,” he stated simply. I sighed and raised them up.  My mother used to wash her hands way too much. She rubbed and rubbed until the poor things were raw and pink. Whenever my father and I told her to quit, she simply said that “we all had to disinfect ourselves of our humanity” and would just wash them some more. No one could get through to her. Not even me. It eventually got the point where she would spend hours on end in the bathroom, scrubbing till her fingers bled. Dad and I tried to ignore it, but word got out and the police came, taking her away forever. As they cleared her from the house, she told me one last thing:

“We will never be sterile until death,”

I was four.

Now my dad is paranoid I’ll follow in her footsteps since I dress like her. Carefully, he examined my fingers and palms. “You’re all right, but why do they smell so much like coconut?” I shrugged, pretending that it was natural. I started to head towards the stairs and told him I was going to meet Len. He grunted a goodbye and shut the door. My dad didn’t like Len. There was no reason to not like him, though. He always just somewhat spontaneous.  And he was smart. He was way smart, wise even. Like a monk. Maybe that was the reason for my dad’s disdain. Len was smarter than him.

Walking out of the house was like exiting one building and entering another. There was no grass or trees like back before the Renaissance. There was cement and shiny new buildings. There were these new glasses you can buy that make you see the world how you want, though. Like, if you love the way the ocean used to look, you’ll see nearby fishing boats instead of cars. I wanted a pair, but as we established, my dad was dead cheap… and the glasses were known to always be involved in accidents. The news said it was because the roads were slick, but my dad kept going on about how that was bullshit; the glasses were blinding people. I thought it was unbelievable. Channel four had said so, and why would the news lie? They were paid to give us the cold hard truth, coming up with conspiracies was a lose- lose situation. Little did I know that they actually were lying. Everything was a lie… but we’ll get to that later.