The Beings Have Fear
‘The Beings have fear,’ says the voice. ‘It is very cute. But it is also devastating. The combination might seem odd, but do remember the times you’ve been devastated by something cute.’
‘The Beings work very hard not to show each other their fear. You see,’ the voice continues, '‘the thing they have the most fear about is that other people will see the fear they have. The whole thing is, again, devastatingly cute. And also just devastating.’
The voice presses a pomegranate, capturing most of the juice in a clean clear glass. The rest dribbles to the floor. It will get sticky soon. The voice offers you the glass, sheepish, and looks for a paper towel. You walk over to the fridge and pull a fresh roll from the cupboard above it. You kiss the voice on the forehead with a quiet smile.
‘There’s this game the Beings play,’ the voice picks back up the thread while wiping down the floor ‘where each will imply that the other is the Wrong Type of Being, to distract them from seeing the fear. This works very well. Just about every Being believes, somewhere inside them, that they are the Wrong Type of Being, or doing the Wrong Type of Things. So when someone else implies this is true in a specific way, it scrambles them with recognition, denial, justification. In other words, it wakes up their own fear, and throws them off the trail of the other Being’s fear.’
There’s something endearing about the way the voice wiped the floor clean, as if trying to hold something together very carefully. You ask the voice to walk up to the ridge with you, to watch the sunset. The voice nods, hands still scrubbing against one another in the sink.
‘They don’t like to know this,’ the voice muses, once you’ve reached the top of the ridge, ‘but the fear is very connecting.’
‘It usually keeps them separate, deflecting the other beings, bouncing them away so they don’t see it. But when they do show each other the fear, when they simply let their voice shake and say “hey, this is scary for me, for x or y reason,” it tends to transform the whole interaction. Often the whole relationship.’
You watch the sun drop over the horizon, like a little ball of butter melting into the ocean.
‘When a Being meets other Beings to show their fear to, and those Beings respond by relaxing and seeing them more clearly — something changes, in both Beings.’ The voice goes quiet again for awhile, as the sun disappears completely.
“I imagine it’s quite scary,” you say, “finding out which Beings will or won’t do that.”
The voice exhales slowly. ‘It is, yes. Quite scary.’
The ridge is quite still, dusk settling in.
“Quite cute too, I’d imagine.”
The voice smiles. ‘Yeah, it’s adorable.’