KINDNESS

After Austin Goodbright waterboarded me with a pissy cloth for skimping out on the $4 lunch table fee, I slumped home deflated and spiritually bald, like the Charlie Brown of urine, to my tenement home. My mother held me in her gentle, impoverished embrace, and kissed me on my pissy cheek. She did not admonish me for not fighting back, nor did she praise me. She was not a turn the other cheek type of mother. She was a kill them with kindness mother.

She told me of a wise monk who lived in the hills over yonder, rinsed me off with only slightly corrosive tap water, and smacked my bottom until I exited through our rickety door. I was to learn the martial art of kindness from this master, and so I trekked, for miles and miles, until the garbage shoes peeled from my feet like onion skin, and then barefoot, amongst the fire ants, until they swelled up like two plump sweet potatoes. After the starch oozed from beneath my toenails and my feet returned to their normal size, I found myself atop the tallest of the hills, where I was met with a suspicious amount of dilapidated sheds. They were arranged in the pattern of a swastika, which I found quite concerning until I remembered that the sheds were located in the East. East of the eastward sheds was a cabin made of solid gold, which I naturally assumed was the monk’s cabin. I knocked on the door, and the monk answered. I had never seen such a hairless man, yet his chi flowed from him like the mane of a great African lion. He looked about 75 pounds and I think he was Laotian. I explained that my mother had sent me and why and he told me my training would begin the next morning. He did not let me in his cabin and threatened to eat me like an oyster if I entered any of the sheds. I slept amongst the critters of the night.

For the first 15 years, the only thing Master allowed me to do was polish the cabin. Kindness, he said, is about helping others. And so I rubbed and rubbed his golden abode until it gleamed more boldly than the pink-orange sun. Sometimes I would hear cries of help! from the cabins, but Master told me to ignore them. Those are the tempting words of Mara rustling through the breeze, he claimed. Do not betray me nor your training, he said. I will eat you like an oyster.

After the first 15 years was waterfall training. I was to go to the forest to the east of the eastern hills and sit under all of the waterfalls. Kindness, Master told me, is about purity. I was to wash away all of my impurities in the cleansing waters. One day, as I sat underneath the easternmost waterfall, I grew anxious as I considered that the master’s golden cabin and all of the swastika sheds were west of where I currently was. Also, the master’s many long-winded and rather angry rants about purity were increasingly worrisome, as were his frequent excursions into the city, which had further devolved into a lopsided sea of tenements and high-rises. I once attempted to send the clean water from the forest home to my mother, and Master bit me. Three years later, a bronze mechanical pigeon delivered me a letter informing me she’d died of sepsis. I cried out all of my remaining impurities that day.

Finally, after 20 more years, Master decided I was ready for practical training. He entered one of the sheds and came out with a well-fed gentleman, who kicked and shouted help! again and again. Master judo threw him, dragging his gelatinous arm over his shoulder, tossing him to the ground. The man began to grovel for his life, offering me a tenement home for the low rental price of $4,000 a month if I helped him escape. A landlord. Master had been abducting landlords from the city and storing them in swastika sheds. Say something nice about this man, Master ordered. If you can treat even a landlord with kindness, your training will be complete. I felt as though any complement towards this pathetic, predatory creature would ring hollow, but I said you have a healthy build. Nothing happened. Master erupted into a fury. No! Kindness, he said, is about telling a lie even you believe.

I told the man his rental practices were just and kept the citizens of the city housed. I thought about the waterfall, then my mother, then Master, then the waterfall again. The purity of my conviction rang the falsehood as truth. The landlord turned beet red, spewed up vomit and violently convulsed. Within minutes, he was dead. Master ferried landlord after landlord out and I lavished each one with earnest praise until they laid in a broken heap of stinking corpses. Among them was Austin Goodbright. I thanked him for that day all those years ago, and when the light left his eyes, I felt good. Then I felt nothing.

Then Master began to feed. He ate all of the landlord corpses like oysters, growing more powerful with each meal. He was now the only landlord left, the Alpha Landlord, set to rule from his golden cabin on the hill. I sorrowfully bowed towards Master, thanking him for everything, and he exploded into a geyser of organs.

I dismantled Master’s golden cabin and went upon using the money to establish equitable housing for the poor. I visited my mother for the first time in nearly four decades, and placed a bottle of clean forest water on her gravestone and said thank you Mother, for teaching me kindness.