I'm rather proud of this "idea" story even tho all it earned were rejection letters when I submitted it for publication. Its disturbing central idea was so new that it startled me when it first occured to me. Eventually, I blended-in a lot of other radical ideas that I had been nurturing for years.

Warning: you're going to run into fairly radical changes in language and punctuation over the course of the story in an attempt to represent linguistic evolution. I still tried to make the narrative comprehensible but it will take some effort on the readers' parts.

The story comprises four vignettes. Each vignette is presented here on a separate webpage. The last vignette was written first. The preceding three were written to explain the last.

THE BOYANSKI PERSPECTIVE

By

John A. Eyon

SIMONE

Research has found the earliest use of the phrase "Boyanski Perspective" in what was then called a website. It bore the year stamp 2011 and was designed and maintained by Simone Decamp – born 1982 – died 2014.

Her death at age 32 was chracterized in a medical report as "systemic deterioration due to depression and self neglect." The narrative she provided at the website includes a tantalizing revelation that might explain her personal decay. That event occurred a few days before her wedding when she suddenly found herself in the throes of a panic attack brought on by the realization that the children she brings into this world will inevitably die.

She called that concept "the Boyanski Perspective" because it came to her when she came upon a passage in the book The Parental Contract written by the parenting expert Jan Boyanski.

Do you lose control when you punish your child, then justify it with "I gave you life"? Did you think that that outweighs the little injuries you inflict – the willful spanking, the demeaning behavior or the other acts of careless parenting? Well, consider this – you also gave your child a lifetime of struggle – and the gift of death.

That last ironic phrase didn’t disturb most humans then. Nor does it now, over 3 decades later – except in a few of us. We few who share that characteristic in Simone’s psychological makeup that made her respond darkly to it.

Her narrative recalls her early dreams of family – her visions of a beautiful daughter to love and nurture – and how the beauty of those dreams faded when Boyanski’s phrase "the gift of death" summoned visions of her beloved daughter growing old and ill and dying.

As she put it: "How could this be love, to create a human with the promise of death at some point in the future?"

Her fiancé couldn’t accept these ideas. So after encouraging him to find someone else who would provide him with the family he wanted, she packed up and left the house they were going to share and faced the rest of her short life alone. It seems her love for him continued unabated – until the moment she died.

Copyright 2003, 2008 by John A. Eyon