"This I Do For You" by Margaret Karmazin

A spoiled child is raised in the lap of luxury until he is finally called on to serve others.

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"This I Do For You" by Margaret Karmazin

Everyone made it clear that I was special. Of course when very young, I took this for granted but later on questioned it. And much later on I hated it.

“Dear Ah-Deet,” some old female would mutter as she stepped into our loogan, which, due to the constant attentions of my mother, was exceptionally comfortable, even luxurious. “I have come to see the Saving-Of-Life and to bring him a little pleasure.” And she would bend down to stuff into my mouth some treat she’d concocted from hamata mixed with nectar or some other sweet and perhaps nut paste for extra flavor. By the time she had gone, I would have devoured the entire bag full. Already, though only five years old, I was almost twice the size of other children my age.

The cries of the other children playing could be heard through our high up windows, but I couldn’t see what they were doing. Our loogans are constructed of processed stone and mostly underground with just the top sticking up over. The round structures are finished off nicely inside with thick plaster, polished wood and pewter or brass trim, then decorated with colorful woven carpets and pottery. As I saw on the picture-viewer, artistic people painted their walls with fabulous designs, though in our house no one was a painter and my mother did not deem this frill necessary.

Mother did not go out to work and I once asked Aunt Reeni, one of my mother’s sisters, “Where does Mother get our money?”

Reeni just smiled. “You are taken care of, Sweetness. Never worry about that.” And she would feed me more delicacies.

But I continued to wonder. They told me that Father had died right after my and my siblings’ eggs hatched. For some odd reason my brothers and sister had been sent to live with the aunts. Supposedly Father suffered an accident while working on a bridge over the Kuli River. He was an engineer. Later on I would question this, whether it was accidental. If he had lived, would he have allowed what happened to happen?

They tell me that he (and I have seen pictures), was unusually tall and strong. His four legs were, they describe, thicker than the norm and capable of pushing him five times his height into the air should he choose to jump. His thorax was wide and muscular, tapering to a slim waist that, according to reports, fascinated the females, as did his scent.

“Only your father could have produced someone like you,” Mother remarked once and when I asked her what she meant, she changed the subject. She never, as far as I know, had another mate. She did not seem to mind that her sisters raised my siblings.

“Why don’t Teti, Voon and Meela live with us? Why is our family different?”

“It just gives me more time to take care of you,” she said, which was odd since other mothers in other loogans took care of their many children.

But then other children did not look like me.

“Why can’t I go too?” I blurted out to Mother and Aunt Reeni when she came to accompany my mother to a village meeting.

“Children do not go to meetings,” Mother replied.

“Teti told me they do,” I countered. By now, Teti and I were nine years old. I envied him as he was slender and strong, his antennae were finely feathered at the ends and like our father, he could jump very high.

Mother looked angry. “Teti will stop feeding you false information or he will not be welcome to visit again.”

“My own brother?” I said, shocked.

She said nothing but looped her bag around her neck and ascended the steps to leave the loogan. She had forgotten to turn on the picture-viewer for me and left me in the silence. With great effort, I pulled myself up from the pile of cushions I lived on and slowly crossed the room to turn it on myself. Though by now I was only nine, my muscles had atrophied and my weight increased greatly. While other Tratians my age could scramble up tree trunks and hang from branches or run up hills while carrying heavy objects, I was weak and as trembly as an old person. Yet everyone behaved as if this were normal.

The viewer entertained me less and less. The same old thing day after day. It depressed me to see people out in the world going to school, attending coming of age ceremonies, learning skilled trades, becoming scientists or artists or mechanics or … well, everything.

“I want to see Teti!” I demanded one morning. He had not been to our loogan for a long time. My sister Meela visited relatively often but though I loved her, she bored me. My other brother Voon had apprenticed to a mechanical engineer some distance from here and now rarely appeared. He was given room and board there.

“I am sorry,” said Mother, “but Teti is very busy with his own apprenticeship. He has very little time outside of his studies.”

I felt a large lump arise in my throat. I cannot fully describe the depths of my despair.

“Why do I have to live like this?” I cried, but she did not answer.