October 2023 Fiction Project: The Witch House – Oct 7

Am I SPOILED?

I have two parents who love me and I love them. My mom is a doctor and my dad is a writer and a game reviewer, a freelancer who works from home. Dad did most of the work of raising me and my younger sister Sally while Mom worked at the hospital. He’s really funny and fun to be around. Mom is the strict one. She says Dad lets us get away with too much. But she SMILES when she says that.

She has the cutest little DIMPLES. Sally does too. I just have chubby cheeks like my dad.

Compared to other kids my age, I get a lot of love from BOTH my parents. And I get cool stuff, too, although I have to do a lot of work if I want something big. Dad says some gifts are experiments in seeing what kind of person I will grow into, but other gifts are proof that I have grown into someone who can take care of the gift.

I guess that’s okay, but it also means I don’t have any pets yet, because Dad says you don’t get to experiment with living creatures’ lives and comfort, and he’s not ready for me or Sally to be responsible for another life yet.

Not even a hamster.

But I have a bike and a library card and a debit card with emergency money on it and a phone. Most kids my age don’t have those things, but Dad says he can trust me with them so it’s fine. Sally is eight and she doesn’t get to have those things yet. I mean, she has a bike but she’s not allowed to ride around without me or Dad, not even to go to a friend’s house.

Dad says I am sparkly on the outside but not the inside. Sometimes he says I am an iron hand in a velvet glove. I asked him where that phrase came from and he said Napoleon. I am my father’s daughter (as Mom says) so I looked up Napoleon and read a bunch of Napoleonic fanfiction and a history of Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon’s wife (for a while, it was a whole thing but I don’t have time to spill THAT tea today).

Now whenever I see a picture of Napoleon with one hand in his jacket, I always think:

WAS HE TRYING TO HIDE HIS IRON HAND?!?

I know Napoleon didn’t really have an iron hand. But I also wonder which hand was his iron hand and which was his human one. Was he a robot? A cyborg? An android or a replicant?

If you look at his face in the portraits that artists painted of him during his lifetime, you can SEE the truth.

Both things are true.

Napoleon had a real iron hand, which he hid inside his jacket or covered with a glove.

Or with fake skin.

AND his iron hand wasn’t real. It was a symbol for diplomacy backed with threats.

After Napoleon was exiled in 1814, people all over Europe made fun of him.

He had brought war to all of Europe and had ruled almost as much territory as the European Union countries before he was defeated. The other armies had won the war against him but they didn’t know how to defeat him.

So they laughed.