The Old Man's Horse
All the affairs of a human life are the old man at the frontier and his horse.
I wasn't a humanities major, so the full meaning and the old anecdote were beyond me. I knew the gist well enough: good things and bad things come by turns.
Which was exactly why I could never bring myself to like that saying.
The day I was accepted to a prestigious university anyone would have known by name, my parents died in a car accident. I threw myself into campus life, thinking I might actually land a job at a decent company — and then, before I quite noticed how, I was kidnapped into graduate school.
Under seniors I wanted dead, and an advisor I wanted to keep stabbing until he begged me to finish him, I endured. And endured. And endured. And I wrote the thesis.
It was my paper, sure, but I still think it was on a ridiculous level. With a little luck, it might even have taken home some prize with a name worth knowing. The comprehensive exam and the preliminary defense had passed as a matter of course. Get through the questions at the final review, and that was the end of it.
Flawless — not a single place to nitpick. My baby, precious enough that I could have said my entire twenty-five years had existed for that paper, was finally supposed to step out into the world.
But.
"......What?"
The red liquid pooled across the floor reflected a girl, white as new snow.
"Fuck!!!!"
It was so fucked that the curse tore out of me. A high voice — the kind only a little girl has — rang through the air. The fact that the sound had come from my own throat made it even more fucked.
Fuck.