These are the perils of weilding a weapon you do not know how to use:
Imagine walking down a dark alley, unlit save for the light of a distant building near its mouth, and, for a moment, the glint of a pen-knife in your hand, the blade drawn and ready to use on any would be attackers.
Picture, now, a figure emerging from the shadows, face dark, impassive, dangerous. See him ask you, quite politely, for money. Hear your voice, trembling, as you hold up the knife---too late you realize it is puny, small, and not entirely useful---and warn him to stay away. Smell the ambient air, thick with traces of smoke and something rotten (you would not deign to think what that something could possibly be). Feel the pain as, after lurching forward and stabbing at him clumsily, he grabs your wrist and twists the knife out of your grasp. Taste the blood in your mouth as he uses the knife to stab you in your chest, takes your money, strips you naked, and leaves you to die, burbling and drowning in your own blood.
And you think, in your last moments, about shameful, painful arrogance, and weapons, and the forms that they take, and the souls that they break.
The worst thing about weapons is not that they kill, or injure, or inflict tortures both real and imagined; it is the illusions they provide, which only break when you cut yourself, and oftentimes not even then.
The pen is the mightiest of weapons, and the one most abused.
posted by Jael @ 9:05 PM
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