The Eleventh Tale:
The Helper
I often took the main road back to the campus. I followed the same beaten path day after day from class to home and back again. There were two girls with shiny black hair and yellowy-olive colored skin. I walked behind them, slowing my pace a bit and letting them direct my feet.
They glanced back once to see why I might be following so closely. I was simply content to listen to their banter in a foreign tongue I would never learn to speak. I parted from them when I reached my building. I opened the door listening momentarily to the quiet hum of modernization. It hadn't been quiet in Trifling since the factory came, pumping out electricity and turning the up-until-now quiet village into a booming voice, all in the name of industry.
I felt some of the echoes of the past, screaming underneath the ever constant humming. In Trifling there was a connecting force, holding together all things. This I knew because I had seen something almost terrifying as a child. I carried around this secret for 15 years. I hid it deep inside my subconscious and did not find it again until I decided to explore why there was such a huge blank in my early childhood memory.