Fiction Is Cheap

FICTION IS CHEAP

She was the first in our family to go to university, and we were all so proud. Our parents and grandparents and older siblings worked and saved and were finally able to pay the fees to have highly educated people transmit some of that education to her.

I was still in primary school when she started, just old enough to get homework. We did our homework together at the kitchen table instead of watching films or reading stories. It felt almost the same, but I missed being able to talk with her about our evenings.

We would always talk together about what we watched, or read. The adults would talk together about places and people they knew from before either she or I was born, and we would talk together about places and people we knew from books and films and shows.

But now we did homework together, and learned facts. Valuable facts, or expensive ones at least. I used to think those were the same thing.

Perhaps we all did.

She soon left us all behind with her knowledge, though she didn't mean to. What did we have to talk about now? We didn't know the same people anymore, either in real life nor in stories. Her thinking became more rigid and absolute the more she lived in fact. There was only one correct way, and it was the way of her peers and professors at university. There was only one source of truth, and it was locked between the covers of her expensive textbooks.

She used to talk to me like an equal, despite the ten year gap in our ages. After a year of expensive education, she was talking down to all of us. We, poor in every sense of the word, who couldn't understand. It wasn't our fault, she assured us, merely our misfortune.

I retreated into stories, alone this time. Hid from homework, and schoolmates, and all the markers of hateful education that had stolen my sister from me. Devoured the library, books and DVDs and all. Wrote fanfiction and shared it freely online. Hit back in every way I could find against the facts, facts, facts of the uncompromising university.

We were both wrong, of course. But when we were ready to return, I think I had it easier than her. She had only her expensive education, filling her mind with solid certainties and absolute superiority. Her imagination had atrophied, and her empathy shrivelled. I, meanwhile, was full of mirror shards. Cheap, broken bits of stories that reflected thousands of unreal minds.

I had a job to find myself amongst the throng. She had a job to find anyone else. It was hard, but we did it. Eventually, after many more years than ever separated our ages, we were sisters again.