I have a great story to tell you. It is a story about evil, and you will find that this evil is closer than you think.

There was a time when the truths of our world were not readily known and, for that matter, could not be known. These truths were secret burdens; hidden from the world’s people to protect them from the despair that would follow if these truths were unleashed. The Creator of this planet, this universe, all that we know and, of course, what lies beyond, concentrated the knowledge of these truths into one living individual. This individual suffered from the despair of these truths alone and was not to share them with any other person. She was known simply as “the Knower of All”.

For centuries, the world was a place full of happiness and carelessness; not a worry in the world among the majority of its inhabitants. There were no fights or quarrels. There was no inequality. Oppression of any kind did not exist. In fact, these words: oppression, inequality, words with any sort of negative connotation were unknown.  It was not merely the words that had not yet come into existence but rather, no harms had ever come to anyone. As I have mentioned, there was not a worry in the world for almost every one of the world’s people. The Knower of All (or simply, the Knower as we will affectionately call her for short) was the only one, of course, who did not and could not share in this worriless lifestyle because the Knower knew things and these were things nobody would ever want to know, you see. I am sure, at this point, you would like to know more about the Knower and what, exactly, it was that she knew.

At the time of her creation, the Knower was blessed (or more aptly, cursed) with the power of knowledge. This power stemmed from the ability to see into the future. These visions of the future came to the Knower in her mind, and she was not to share them with anyone. One night, a long, long time ago, while reveling in some of the past truths she had uncovered through her visions, the Knower began to see a scenario in her mind. As the scene disappeared, the Knower fell to the floor. She had just had a vision, and in it was knowledge of a time soon to come. This knowledge had brought her more despair than she had ever felt before.  After this incident, the Knower was visibly shaken. She wept loudly in public and those around her, who had never before seen or experienced sadness, merely assumed she must be elated; crying tears of happiness, of course!

The Creator saw the utter despair that had befallen the Knower. It was far more pain than the Creator had ever intended to bestow upon her. The Creator knew the only way to make the Knower’s pain more bearable was to spread the despair; to have her share it with others and remove the world’s burden from the Knower alone. That night, as the world slept, a story full of images crept into the minds of each and every individual. The images were the same ones the Knower had seen earlier that day. They were images of mass destruction, hatred and revenge. They were images of inequality, oppression and marginalization. They were images of disease and death. They were images of impoverished families living in the streets and comparatively wealthy passersby shooting them looks of contempt while discussing the latest episode of “Keeping up with the Kardashians”. There was ignorance and there was apathy. In all of these things, the Creator was showing the world that evil was coming.

 In the morning, when the world had awakened, there were tears shed every which way the Knower looked. She knew, of course, that nobody was crying tears of happiness. The world did not know what to do with this terrible knowledge. For them, it was too much too soon, but the story could not be taken back.

The above story deviates quite heavily from Leslie Silko’s original. The point I wanted to hit on, however, was that stories cannot be taken back. Once they are out there, they are out there. In the story I mentioned, there is an obvious positive side to the knowledge of “evil” coming into the world. It is lifting a veil of ignorance and, of course, the ignorance of our world to all of its evils is an evil in and of itself. It is not only the story itself that matters, though. What I learned from sharing this story is that in large part, how you share a story matters as well. The Creator shared the story with the inhabitants of the world in a manner that perhaps proved to be too much for the emotional capacity of any human (especially when you’re living in a time when these evils simply do not exist and you cannot fathom their existence) and sent its inhabitants into disarray. So, I have a question for you guys: how do we tell our stories and who do we share them with? Is there such a thing as telling “too much” or telling “too much, too soon”? Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading my story and I would love to hear your thoughts on it. I may have missed the mark completely, but hey, I had a fun time writing this!

Works Cited

“Canada Income Inequality.” Canada Income Inequality. Web. 28 Jan. 2015. <http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/news/canada-income-inequality/>.