An Excerpt From My Work-In-Progress

Tuesdays are the days I showcase my own work on this blog. Today I'm sharing the beginning page of my wip, a sci-fi thriller.

Prologue

The sad and simple fact is, some humans are labeled monsters. This has been true since the beginning of recorded history. Some are born physically misshapen, no legs or arms, enormous heads and spindly bodies, crooked backs, joined twins, no sexual organs or both sexual organs. Others have horribly misshapen faces, no eyes or mouth, two noses, chins in odd places.  These corporeal abnormalities were once considered God’s retribution for the sins of the parents, but now they are thought of as nature’s accident, an unlucky roll of the dice, nobody's fault.

There is, however, a different breed of monster, where the deformity is hidden from the eye. The face and body may be faultless, yet a twisted gene or harmful drug taken during pregnancy results in a malformed psyche.

 Monsters are deviations from the traditional norms. As one child is born without legs, another can be born without empathy and without a conscience. The child born without legs eventually learns he is handicapped, and struggles to adjust, to overcome his physical abnormality. But the child born with no compassion goes through life unaware of his defect, because he has nothing visible to compare with others. He wrongly assumes everyone is exactly like him, coldblooded, calculating, unfeeling. To this kind of fiend, a soul-stricken man seems weak, even ludicrous, in the same way that to a criminal, honesty seems pathetically stupid.

This mean, of course, that to an inner fiend, normal human kindness is monstrous.