◤𝕊𝕙𝕒𝕕𝕒𝕞𝕪◢ - It Started With Vomit!

Prologue | It Literally Started with Vomit

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"Don't eat that shit! My mother says it clogs up your digestive tract, and you can die quickly from it," said a rightfully concerned child. 

He was hanging upside down from the playground monkey bars, his words foul but well-intended. 

"Oh Pu-leeeeeeeeeeese!" Amy dismissed him, uncaring of the sage advice. She shoved a generously infested pile of sand in her quaking hands into the embrace of her urgent, watery taste buds before reposting, "My mommy says it helps build a ra-ziz-tanse to germs!"

The stranger, feeling sympathetic towards Amy who, clearly, lacked the influence of a responsible adult in her life, released a heavy sigh. 

He tried advising her once more.

"Have you considered calling CPS?"

"No!" she answered immediately, confident in her poor judgment, which took him aback. How and why was she so comfortable disregarding her own wellbeing? Just by that firm response, the boy reckoned Amy was the mastermind behind deliberating and acting on said health advice—advice that supposedly built a resistance to germs. After all, no adult in their right mind would encourage a child to consume granular material to bolster their immune system.

The boy gathered himself after that shock. Now some-what recovered from the absurdity of the situation, he forced himself to absorb information with an unshaken, level-headed frame of mind. As reason returned to him was when he observed a wide, cheeky grin splayed across Amy's face. Everything became clear in that instant. For lack of a better verb, the boy realized that she was bullshitting him!

"Suit yourself," he said, returning his gaze to the sky, scanning for something amongst the screaming sequence of colors above his head.

Clasping onto a neon-blue rung firmly, the child performed an Olympic swing onto another bar after pausing to scan the firmament once more. Amy wondered why he being so careful about his movements. It wasn't until he moved onto another ladder rung — a yellow one — that she recognized that he wasn't assessing the monkey bar's soundness.

Blue...

Yellow...

Red...

"Green," she whispered to herself.

This person was making a game out of color preferences.

Weird, Amy thought, squinting in an attempt to see past the sun's blinding rays. Were she correct, a neon-blue rung should be next. 

Amy watched as he dangled flexibly like a leaf blowing in the wind before picking up momentum, making a successful transition to another rung. Her eyes were stinging from holding out against the sun's blistering heat for so long. Plus, the new-found revelation that her parents may be trying to kill her by correlating immunity with eating sand fuelled her dejection. As Amy chose to ignore the boy's activity and backed the sun, meaning to resume her pretend play, the activity immediately bored her. It was dangerous and simply not as enjoyable ever since Mr. Ruiner-of-Fun had admonished her behaviour. 

Ruiner of fun...

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Amy regained her fervor.

She got up and out of the sandbox, empowered by the urgency to solve his identity — and, curiously, to predict which ladder rung he would swing onto. Having been irritated, Amy felt compelled to also ruin his method of having fun. And she supported her petty decision with an equally petty rationale: that if she couldn't enjoy simple pleasures sans antagonism because someone chose to taint the fantasy — which, in this case, would be her imaginative dishes of rock-meat, fish-sticks, and rice-gravel — they would not part ways peacefully.