The low-hanging fruits of the liberty tree

Flash fiction of a teen without an elephant

No matter what imaginary tortures I dreamed up for Malik, he was still very much there in reality, tweaking my hair and stealing my pocket change. Far from my destroying him with fantastic battle elephants and warlocks adapted from my fave TV shows, he had in fact grown a little entourage. Now, instead of solo act Malik the Bully, it was Malik plus two: Kesley Snodgrass and Lizzie McGruder, a pair of snivelly fucks who had attached themselves to Malik for the leechlike lulz.

The actual torment wasn't any worse - the hairpullings and chinese burns and armtwistings didn't hurt any more than they had before - but somehow it was more painful to undergo this ordeal with these spotty twerps looking on and laughing through their poorly-braced chompers.

I don't want to be classist and call them trailer trash or anything - hell, I live in a trailer and I think they have actual houses - but if you're going to get braces for your snotty offspring, Mr and Mrs Snodgrass, Mr and Mrs McGruder, then for God's sake splurge a little and get proper braces, otherwise what's the point? Now, instead of twisty malformed dentature, you've got twisty malformed dentature plus badly-fitted infrastructure, and what have you gained by that?

Anyway, Malik had intensified his campaign of suppression and expoliation, with myself as The Scramble for Africa and him as Late Colonialist Power. Kesley and Lizzie looked on and sniggered like... like sniggering onlookers at an episode of colonialist exploitation, I guess. (I really need to think my analogies through)

High School sucked, of course, but it sucked significantly less when I was in class and displaying my undervalued smarts. Outside class was where all the covert intimidation became overt ouchies.

You might say: why are you concealing your trauma, Deepak? Aren't you one of those victimized teens I keep hearing about who live with their withering burden until they snap under it or else are brought to healing in a glowing redemption arc that reaffirms our hope in humankind?

To which I would say: not so fast there, Young Adult media consumer. Not all trauma is in the form of weakness. Some of it is in the form of great imaginative leaps of becoming.

Maybe most. My battle elephant, though unsuccessful in stomping Malik into goo because of his basic unphysicality, was nonetheless a triumph of imagination that accompanied me through weeks of climbdowns stained with snot and tears.

Insubstantial battle elephant Supratika had brought me a warrior’s spirit, and now I was ready to fulfil its promise. I would duel Malik to the death, or perhaps less dramatically until he wept hot tears and vowed to leave me alone.

Is that redemptive enough for you, YA fan? Of the two valid paths out of the vale of traumatic experience - hours and hours of painful and expensive therapy, or swift and uplifting retribution - wasn't that the one you were rooting for? The stomping one? The less boring one?

Violence is always a solution, no matter how much the mendacious weasels known as so-called adults insist otherwise, while covertly knowing still otherwise again deep in their secret lying hearts. My own individualized violent solution occured to me one afternoon as I was passing through the changing rooms on my way to the school nurse, having been clobbered by a wanton swing at batting practice. No birdies flitting in rings around my head, as the cartoons would have you believe, but a certain amount of shrilling birdsong in my left eardrum, for sure.

There, looking in through the window to the changing room and the showers beyond, it occured to me: the answer to the enigma of asymmetric force. My eyes zoomed in on this with a Tarantinoesque snap-zoom, and it was there in front of me. The great leveller between bruiser Malik and weedy self. It had been dangling there in front of me the whole time. Low-hanging fruit.

So the dénouement came shortly after - note the fancy critic-speak snatched from a well-spoken redditor, the kind of terminological scavenging that gets me A’s in English, even though it’s a French word. Teachers love that shit. I was bandaged rather uselessly by the school nurse and given a note to walk to the ambulatory clinic of Herr Doctor Hermann Slobodnik and seek further treatment for my actual trauma, possibly concussive in nature. Woozy but triumphant from my insight, I staggered out of the school grounds and made my way towards the town center.

I could have avoided the next part by taking a different route but I was ready to implement my plan, and chose confrontation instead. Aren't you glad I did, you YA redemptive-arc freak, you?

There he was, at the patch of ground near the old tire changing place. the grinning oaf, in his stolen sneakers and his sweatpants-sweatshirt-sweatband combo, the sweaty trio that spelled athleticism but in fact betokened anything but. He was a pudgy oaf, Malik, a half-cooked loaf of sweetbreads in a sweatsuit with no fundamental strength to him except blind-luck size.

Already, at age sixteen, he was running to fat and betokening a middle age with a vast unrestrained middle spilling out all over like an encroaching landslide. Catastrophe was beckoning him in the short, medium and long term. His downfall was only a matter of timeframe.

He was sitting on discarded ottoman leafing through my Jane Austen novel that he'd taken the day before and picking his nose. In an unforgivable insult to Jane, he used the nose-picking digit to flick through the pages.

I'd like to be able to report that he was holding it upside-down and looking for pictures, but in fact he looked quite engrossed in the elegant prose. But it's better to say that he was holding it upside-down and looking for pictures, so yeah, that's what I'll say when they ask: he was holding it upside-down and looking for pictures.

He squared up when he saw me, chucked Jane into the pile of half-burned tires. and the bullying was on. He didn't have his entourage to hand right now but he could still relish the exercise of brute power. But surely he sensed that this supremacy was fleeting and fragile, so there was a certain melancholy to this relishing, a peach-blossom-falling-to-the-ground samurai-type thing going on. Sometimes even slobs have their own plebeian bushido.

The dialogue that followed was conventional and pains me to even remember, so you can fill in the details yourself with scraps from novels and teen dramas of your preference.

He: Taunting we-meet-again crap.
Me: Defiant plucky comeback. 
He: You're gonna regret or somesuch.
Me: Don't think so.

So we squared off and the great duel was on.

Then it was over.

He was lying on the ground puking and crying. I was taking advantage of this moment to inflict a series of sharp face-kicks, just as a light side-serving of snack-sized pain.

The one who said never kick a man when he's down had never been bullied day-in day-out for seven years by a relentless pudge-fleshed nemesis. Had never had to conjure up imaginative familiars and spells made of herbal concoctions and sci-fi weapons to deal with all my helplessness.

I quite loved Malik as I stood over him and spat a fat green one into his bloody weeping face. I feel Jane A. herself would have approved, though her good manners wouldn't have allowed her to express it out loud. Surely she would have understood the intimate bond between bullier and bullied that can never be erased even by a swift sharp dose of payback. It's as close as lovers in its way, this bond.

And now I knew Malik was the last of his descendence, his germline extinguished with him - as he would never breed any bullyspawn now - I felt a certain tenderness toward him as I smashed at his nose with my puny fists so much like tangles of knotted damp linguine.

And the secret to my righteous vengeance, the great leveller in our asymmetric confrontations? There's a certain masculine vulnerability - and I'm not talking fragile egos or brittle toxic narcissism here - that is available for all us victimized to exploit. It's dangling there before us all like ripe low-hanging fruit.

Once that path is taken, though, there's only merciless cold rage available; anything less would be a betrayal to the name of retribution. All or nothing - and nothing means my extinction, so it has to be all.

Malik wouldn't bother me any more. Malik wouldn't bother anyone any more. It would be nice to say he saw the error of his ways and remade himself in a redemptive process of healing, but it really wasn't like that.

But maybe it's better to say that he remade himself in a redemptive process of healing, so yeah, that's what I'll tell you: eventually he remade himself in a redemptive process of healing. He's a productive and much-loved member of the community today, and so am I.

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If the last shall be first, this will only come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists.
Frantz Fanon

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Made as a response to the prompt by Fictionistas as follows:

• MAGNIFY: Up close, everything looks different. Zoom in to focus on a moment, a detail or an emotion.

• FIGHT THE GIANT: Your hero will have to face her adversary at some point. Why not now?

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Read the prequel to this tale here…