She remembered how one of those bedeviled executioners let the head roll out of the bag, took it by the hair, and displayed it to the crowd before returning it to its basket-a basket that looked to the very young Gabriele as if it should be used for apples. Even so long ago she tacitly condemned the adult monsters that enjoyed the macabre and applauded such savagery in the name of justice. Still her monstrous father, her teacher, had inadvertently led her into that large life- changing enlightenment that was always arrived at from a corridor through the darkest abyss. Partially from being pushed along with the crowd and partially from human curiosity, he had shown her the loss of innocence through the realization that society, that lovely refinement of conveniences and kind neighboring policemen, was a horror. Even when so young, she intuitively guessed that Turkey was just an outward display of a refined and obscure savagery that had to be in all adult institutions regardless of what they were or the nations they were in. She didn't exactly think it but she felt it all the same. With tears that she could never shed and by grief, full empathy, and comradery for this unknown individual, she had walked into the full darkness of enlightenment. The sentiments for the slain man would remain dormant and mute in her thoughts all the rest of her life but the enlightenment, the darkness, would be more active in its behavioral influence.
Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes! Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable. How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele did not feel much misanthropy.
Her ideas, she knew, were as rare as a Tennessee Coneflower or a Black Outhouse Hollyhock-both of which bordered on extinction. They were as ineffable as the very universe she resided in and as pessimistic as Hobbes' social contract theory (although to her who often liked dressing up in black, black was not pessimistic being the color of intrigue and enlightenment). She believed that Hobbes was somewhat wrong in thinking that humans suppressed their own savagery through the common necessity of not wanting to be murdered in their beds. The contract wasn't as simple as that alone. The adult Gabriele thought that through society small doses of competitive cunning could be exuded in basic business competition and politics for the whole duration of one's long life. The common workers left out of both, if given a high enough salary, would not be anarchists or proletariat revolutionaries if they had enough money to go to action packed movies or sports stadiums, buy whores once in a while, or other benign conduits of savagery. In short, she believed that society came about for the purpose of giving its members a long lifetime of small doses of savagery instead of a few episodes of gluttonous devouring that could cause one to be murdered rather easily. She wasn't sure of the specifics. She hadn't thought it worthy of her time to think them out in an obscure philosophical treatise. Besides, figuring out why the dog bit the bone wouldn't stop the biting.
"What are you doing, girls?" Gabriele smiled at them and walked toward the stone.
"Wer' gonna killem, Lady," said the eldest girl.
"What per se are you hoping to rob of a life?"
"Lady'speakin' Shakespeare," said the eldest.
"Wer' gonna open these lizzardheads like coconuts and pull out the brains and give'em to you, Lady, so that you can have breakfast," elucidated the second one.
They laughed and Gabriele smiled widely, fully amused by their non- feminine creative play. "My ladies, methinks thou art so nice, but unfortunately I've already had breakfast."
"Lady'speakin Shakespeare again," said the first one.