The Proposition

I am a liar... I have always been a liar. When I was a child, my lies were all about the fantastic toys I did not have and the awesome friends I did not know and the video games I had allegedly beaten and the sports I was secretly a master of. Of course, in the childhood age of presumed innocence, my lies were graciously written off as a by-product of my vibrant imagination. Lying became my hobby and my passion and my favorite pastime and, when I did not have live audience for yet another unlikely tale of personal achievement, I would end up lying to my own imaginary friends. And so I kept on lying.

In my teenage years, the hormones kicked in and the lies about the fantastic toys were replaced with lies about fantastic girls I did not date and the popular friends who were craving my company and the countries I travelled to and the adventures I had. The teenage years were much tougher on me... I would get caught lying and mocked for it with the exquisite cruelty of adolescence. At times, it seemed even my imaginary friends were getting harder to lie to. Nevertheless, I kept on lying.

In my twenties, my lies continued their evolution to embrace the jobs I did not have, lovers I did not sleep with, ambitions and accomplishments, troubles and solutions, ups and even downs that were as real as the words needed to describe them. It was getting increasingly problematic to find anyone who would take my lies seriously. It's not that I was not good at lying – practice did make perfect. It was just that my lies had become so elaborate and far-fetched that they often defied the basic laws of physics, economics, politics, religion and all the other lie-infested disciplines that were developed by much more sophisticated liars than I. Still, I kept on lying.

Many years have passed since I was a young man... it is very hard to say how many for sure. I have lied about time and age so much that both are a bit of an enigma for me. Or, perhaps, they are not an enigma at all and I am just lying. Perhaps, I was lying about anything and everything I said so far. Perhaps, I will keep on lying for the rest of my story... it is up to you, my imaginary friend, to decide.

They say lying will get you anywhere these days. That anywhere was currently a narrow alley strewn with garbage and filth and ecologically friendly empty boxes of ecologically hazardous goods and other marvelous things discarded and forgotten by our highly advanced civilization. I was sitting on the cracked pavement with my back to the cracked wall and looking at my unflattering reflection (wild grey hair sticking out in every impossible direction, bushy eyebrows, sardonically squinted eyes that went just fine with my sardonically twisted mouth, nicely flattened nose that was bent slightly to the east and a strong chin forever hidden under a chaotic beard) in the cracked screen of a massive TV set. The one thought circling through my brain for some time now (I don't know how long... anyhow time is a relative notion... especially for me) was that we had far too many cracked things for a highly advanced civilization. The cracks were positively everywhere – in the infrastructure, in the architecture, in the family, in the society, in the governing coalition, in the military, in the church, in the bottom of the ocean and the summit of the mountain range... if you come to think of it, even I had a crack – not that I would like that one to be mended.

I heard a quiet hiss from my left and slowly turned my head to look at a creature that was once a kitten. Its normal progression into cat-hood was altered somewhat drastically by fighting a chainsaw or a combine harvester or an alligator or Godzilla or an alliance of them all, for that matter. The creature missed a right eye and, as an insult to symmetry, a left ear. Its tail was mostly chewed off... whatever was left of it was dangling obscenely. There was another thing that was similarly chewed off and was dangling with equal obscenity close to the half-tale. The fur of the cat, where there was any fur left (with the rest/most of the body covered with scar tissue), was a peculiar mixture of orange, grey, white, black, brown and a patch that could very well be green. Speaking of green, the creature's single green eye was busy studying me and, judging by its expression, was not much impressed by what it was seeing. I smiled at it with my winning smile and took out a piece of dry bread from my (unsurprisingly) cracked leather jacket.