We've Been Lied To

             This is the truth of the legendary land of Wocasti, a place so mystical that its roots came as a shock to the few who were fortunate enough to discover them. Just as a disclaimer, this story is a bit abstract and fantastical, so you will really need to pay close attention to the details so you know what's happening. Now, put away those earbuds, toss out that second tab, stop arguing with your mother about how your sore muscles negated you from washing the dishes, and buckle up for a journey about the origins and expeditions in this magnificent tale through the eyes of young Levi.

How We TRULY Came To Be

“Let me tell you a story, young ones, of a land so magical that all the fairy tales in the world bowed down to its glory and mystique. It is the story of our land, the place we’ve all held so close to our hearts since birth, the story of Wocasti,” a warm chuckle mixed with a hint of booze ushered a chorus of giggles and eager anticipation to spread across the faces of seven jubilant youth. Amongst them was me, my black luscious curls gently stroking my otherwise gigantic forehead, “the sleekness of a thousand stallions” protruding outwards, as mom had always called it.

“You see, our land has always been the way it is, patches of ebony and milky white alternating across different seams as far as the eye can see. Through the natural selection of our kind, we’ve slowly yet surely adapted to the color scheme and adopted a select set of vision to better see the land. Sometimes, this distinction can lead to organization at its peak, as our society has segregated different regions of our land for different purposes,” the old man wheezed.

“Is that how slavery first began, with the whites oppressing the blacks?” an eager comrade of mine inquired.

“Yes, it is indeed, but that is a practice long abolished and properly disposed of in our traditions. Now, as I was saying, our land has always been black and white, a notion as nearly bound to the laws of nature as putting milk before cereal. But one day, our very core was struck as a rash and ill-advised settler by the name of Coltopher Crisumbus embarked out on a mission to add color to our life.”

“Ugh, I shudder at even the thought. And of course, his voyage was unsuccessful, correct?”

“Perhaps so, perhaps not. We will never know, as his voyage was never complete! Legend has it that he did in fact find a new land millions of miles South, but was so denuded of proper resources that his body failed him, and his death bed lay in a field of pinkish tint. Haha, of course that is just a legend after all, and old folk like me have attained far greater sense than those scallywags trying to spread around this rumor.”

“But what if he was right? What if the legend was true and there was some color in this world. Would it really harm our civilization to try and scour for a new horizon?” I piped in, my cheeks a blush the color of Coltopher’s graveyard. My outburst was met with 6 puzzled glances and a scowl entombed by gray hair.

“That’s precisely the mindset that got Coltopher killed. And we don’t want any more death around here, what with our environment already possessed by such a dreary hue. Best you lot stay out of trouble now. Good night,” the old man muttered, stumbling out of the room and leaving my curiosity, quite literally, plunged into darkness.

That night, the darkness’s acquaintance decided to spark a bit of a practical joke, and a vision as broad as the widest of valleys was invoked upon me.

It began, as any lucid dreamer may suppose, with running. CRUNCH! Twigs snapped beneath my feet as lucious soil hardened to black tar with every step, and a flurry of black and white streaks garnished my vision. My heart snorted thousands of pounds of steroids and leaped out of my chest, spinning circles like mad men lacking purpose in life, and sweat invigorated my pores and revitalized the white land beneath my feet. Who or what I was running from was the least of my concerns, as simply pondering that may very well be the perpetrator of my demise. Suddenly, a twig introduced itself to my left leg, and my leg halted in place to return the greetings, much to the quietus of the rest of my body, which lurched forwards and tumbled down a hill as steep as a bitcoin stock following a rainy day in the market.

I look up, and all around me are mountains as rosy red and plumply pink as the most comprehensive account of a valentine story may be. As I gaze at the majestic nature of these towering pillars, a voice berates me from the fourth dimension. “Levi… LEVI!”

The sweat collects in a bout, and I am awakened from my slumber. All around me are 7 impertinent faces, the blackness of the sky lubricating their eyes with vivid tenor.

“Wha- what happened?” my voice stumbled out with a distinctive tremor.

“You were screaming in your sleep, and we couldn’t make it soundly to the morning with your incessant groaning,” Derek, the walking, wheezing encyclopedia slobbered out.

“Sorry” I coughed out between gasps, and hit the sack once more with my unsuspecting  intentions for the next day’s happenings as far from devious as a politician is from peace.

And lo and behold. Who ever said dreams were just figments of your imagination concocted for stimulation of the brain and enacted out as satirical corroboration of one’s stupidity? Oh right, it was Derek. Well, it just so happens that his 200 IQ couldn’t substantiate the more mystical elements of life. Because as it was to happen, I went out for a harmless little stroll to test the lands of our time, and the town saw nothing more of it. But rather than stopping and making a 180 at Kcabnrut Street like most civilians do, I continued sauntering, past the thick leafy forests of dense black and white vegetation, the pitch black desert where the longest of eyes strains coupled with the most extensive passing of time could not grant one even the most marginal of slivers of vision, and finally, to No Meber’s Land, a place so desolate and uncharted that only one person has ever seen it, and that too only in the tales of one old man, the most cantankerous that I’ve known.

As I stepped past the barriers of that sign, my dejectedness grew to the height of Mt. Black Vest, as the terrain seemed no less black and white than the impoverished, melancholy-stricken colony that I’d just departed from. Then, as I began to turn around and concede to the insolent nature of my comrades, a net spawned in from the depths of the ground and propelled me down past a layer of thick charcoal dust and on top of yet another mountain. Yet something was different about this one. It still took on the same rigid, conic shape as any other drab mountain glazed in white flour  and black gunpowder that I’d been so accustomed to in my infancy. Yet the tint was off. As I rubbed the rather smooth and perfectly curvy tip of this mountain which had injected itself into my bottom, my eyes glistened, and reflected back to me a succulent, crispy pink. In fact, a neglected gaze around showed me that all of the mountains similarly enamored me with such a magnificent hue, and the legends of cotton candy and flamingos sprouted out of my memory and embedded themselves into the backdrop.

As I levitated to cloud nine amidst this mythical setting, a firm, sinewy hand stricken by veins pulled me down, and a few hairy fibers crawling from the hand leaped out and tickled my cheek. White, glossy, hairy fibers. A type of white I’d recognize from a mile away with my eyes closed and hands taped a thousand times behind my back.

“Oh, Levi, what a pleasure it is to see you here,” the old man uttered his telltale snicker and wheezed a raspy, deathly puff of static-black smoke into my eyes.

If my emotions were a school, they just shifted to Texas, as shooters were breaching their headquarters from all angles, and this ambush has just sent them into critical lockdown. Horror, trepidation, comfort, relief, anxiety, tranquility, and most of all, betrayal were all intermingled in a melting pot of crises within me, and it was as if I just found out that I won the lottery, my dog died, I have a final test that I hadn’t studied for in 20 minutes, the lottery ticket was fake, Elon Musk just donated 10 billion dollars in my name, I just burnt my finger, and cancer was cured all in the same finite moment. So of course, through all the chaos, the equivocal nature of my predicament caused me to mutter some of the most profound, astounding words of our generation thus far in a quest to seek out answers.

“How did this all happen?”

A brass chuckle lit my fuse on fire, and I began to encroach on more demanding territory.

“So you knew of all this? Our town, on death's row, all of us, infused with hunger and poverty, and the glorious fields of grass and color to remedy us all was beneath your very fingertips, yet you could only hold your tongue and utter not a word? How lowly of a creature must God have made you for you to live in such indecency?” I sputtered out, the fumes of a millions ancestors trickling out from my ears.

“Easy there, buckeroo. Sit down, on this warm, sultry patch of grass, and let me tell you a story. It is the story of our land, the place we’ve all held so close to our hearts since birth, the story of Wocasti. But this won't be like any other story, and certainly not one you’ve heard of. This will shed some light on the truth, because I think it’s time you hear it.” The old man gulfed down what appeared to be ginger ale meddled with seasoning, and with a cautious raise of my eyebrow, my buttocks met the tingle of soft grass, an unearthly sensation to say the least.

“In a world infused with such socialist ideologies as ours, we are all under the ruse that the happiness and freedom tingling down our backs in our drunken stupors and momentary jubilance at being free from oppression and into the beloved hands of liberation is a worthy proponent of how the world should be, compared to the tyrannous grasp of how it could have been. But where we as a species falter, and what has ultimately led us to such a post-apocalyptic stage of our world is that we haven’t ever opened our eyes to the prosperities that lie in submission. Sure, the mere presence of that word may send a shudder down the narrow canals of our puny frames of minds, but sacrificing the moral principles and pillars that bring us down in our government does not mean a total collapse of bearing fruits in our labor, and a world under the total command of a powerful being can still be a better world if everyone gets what they want. And I sought out, many moons ago, under the imposterous identity of an old decrepit man whose spent his fair share of years as a veteran of war and a propagator of peace to latch onto this ruined town and manage my way under the radar towards truly unearthing the secrets behind this planet. And then it hit me: color. I sought out for many many generations until I found this place, and it holds the sweet nectar-like verdict to cleanse our rotten society and finally bring about peace in this world. But there was just one, small problem,” the old man’s raspy voice sent me into paralysis.

“Your findings wouldn’t be accepted” I cooed, my eyes dilating towards the old man’s feet. I noticed that they were ragged and worn out, like he’d never touch a pair of boots a day in his life.

“Precisely. So I decided to hoard it all for myself, bathe in the sweet sanctuary of happiness and peace that God had showered upon society eons ago and skimmed under our very noses. Oh what a cheeky creature He was, hiding all of these secrets in plain sight all along, one of which I was sullenly awakened too when dwelling on the tips of one of these glossy pink hills and idling about.”

“So this whole time, when you had been out on the mightiest of adventures and battling the most cumbersome of demons that we could not have seen ourselves, you were gallivanting about along these plains? Despicable,” I spat on the old man’s feet, and the moisture seemed to do his charcoal slippers degenerating by the minute some good, instantly making me regret my benevolence.

“Yes, especially after I learned that this land was a cow. All of it. You see, that fateful day on top of the hill when I was snoozing the day away, an explosion of white creamy magma erupted out and coated my being in a thick and delicious liquid. Flabbergasted of course, I stood there with my mouth agape for many a moment, until a few drops of the liquid pestered my taste buds. It was milk. You see, we are surrounded not by the hills of such a fantastical world but by the udders of an eternal cow, whose configuration we’ve been sequestered on for millennia at end. And to think we never realized this, when surrounded by black and white figures, which had the complexity and texture of such a fine beast right beneath our very feet? It is no wonder our civilization was on the brink of ruination and collapse,” the old man wheezed out despite the agonizing state of his lungs, and was thrown to the ground by his disproportionate balance.

“I don’t understand. How could this all be true? Cows are slender, docile organisms which couldn’t come close in their size and strength to carry an entire race, much less their posterity for generations to come” I was panting at this point, and beads of sweat were knocking on the door to re-enter my membrane.

“Oh but it is, and was hidden in the name all along. Oh how pathetic our people were, to not notice this fine detail in the utterance of a word they use so often to call their home. Open your eyes boy, my time is short. Wocasti, the name of our town if spelled out in reverse, is ‘Its a cow’.” The old man grunted a bloody and excruciatingly drawn out noise, and his hands were vibrating with so much vigor that it appeared they would jump out of their sockets and slap me across the face.

“Old man, if I can even call you that, although our journey with each other was slim and bitter to my core, I loathe to see you die here in no one’s embrace but mine. So tell me, before you part ways with this world, something for me to take back to our people to explain this warped conundrum,” my arms clumsily wound their way behind the old man’s back, as I lowered him into the grassy bed of photosynthesis heaven.

A smile was brutally executed upon the man’s face, and his eyes whimpered shut.

“Just remember this much, Levi, and relay this message to the others. The grass is always greener on the udder side.”

And with that, death was upon him, ascending up through the wind and whistling past every evergreen blade our world has with his soul.