It was like any other day, walking the familiar streets of my home. I turned my coat up against the cold, and that’s when I saw him. A man sat upon my stoop, his hand outstretched towards me with a longing look in his eye, his coat ruffled and dirty, his shoes shredded. I looked on him with shock and terror at his condition, my heart beating with the fear and disgust that only comes with understanding of a being so alien as to be inhuman. For inhuman he was to me, as I was to him.

You see, I was brought into this world the proper way. Born of a strong father and a good doctor who knew all the rituals of birth. Me and my brother beside me were delivered according to the books of medicine that were written by the men who know about such things. These sacraments were passed down from father to son, and from master to apprentice, lest they be lost to time and we fall back to the primitive. This man, maybe, was born by primitive means. I had seen pictures of those means in the storybooks read to me aloud; the huts at the edge of the woods, filled with screams, blood, and offal.

I wince, jerked from that terrible place. Yes, I think I can smell it on him even now.

Our doctor was indeed, one of the best, for he had passed through the hallowed halls of medicine where men in their white coats learned to cut and sever, but more than that they learned the right ways of living, and in their mercy, passed this on to us. The difference between strong and weak was of course, in the blood and those that have blood should walk the path of the lamb. The rest of us must instead fight for our place like wolves. This unyielding truth should shape our whole lives, so the doctors say, and their higher knowledge of blood is what gives them their place separate from us.

Moreover the doctors teach us how to be strong so that we might fight for our worth. This is the reason to be strong, and those that are weak clearly must have forsaken the path that the doctors put in place for them. A strict diet, rigorous exercise, and abstaining from the practices of heathens is all a body needs to keep up the fight. Anything more or less is uncharted territory that should not be entered into.

My brother and I were raised on the food of this country. The golden grains flowed freely into our gullets, the meat and eggs making us strong and fat. The doctor told us to eat heartily. It was this that separated us from the savages after all. Pictures of starving children were passed around the dinner table, their skin stretched tight around their bones, their eyes bulging, their fingers long and greedy, ready to pick the flesh off a vulture and shove it into their greasy lips. This man’s lips were much the same. Morsels of rotting flesh hung from his beard. He had clearly been gorging himself on that food that makes you gaunt and weak. The kind that is rummaged from dumpsters and from poorhouses. The kind that sticks to your insides and coats your throat with its choking stench.

My brother was, at birth, tested for her blood and separated. I was found lacking and so, alone now, I was cast into the field for the older boy’s sport. I must prove my worth this way. Boys that spent too long at the teat became drooling and daughterly, and their attractions uncouth. It was very clear to all of us boys that an overabundance of love was sickeningly wrong. A surefire way to lose that which gave us our value. For it was not blood that flowed through our veins, but flint. That flint was useful and each of us chipped at it in our own ways, sharpening and honing it until, our fingers and wrists bleeding, we might finally brandish it.

When I came of age, it was finally time for me to secure my worth in the world. I must now leave the safety of our family home and find my fortune in the streets. My brother once, now secure in her blood, would stay at home. She had no need for fortune since her value was in her blood. Might as well cut the head off and save us all some trouble! I thought in my father’s voice. But by this age that procedure had become unfashionable, and was only now practiced by the thieves and barbarians across the sea. With their scimitars, they would hack their women to pieces just for sport! Here, we use scalpels to cut out the evil; the men ordained by the university would strap her to a table and cut away anything that might threaten her blood. More often though, as a civilized society, we simply constrain her so that she might not do any harm to herself.

The man in front of me is more of the barbarian sort. I can see it in the corners of his eyes and in the wicked smile etched into his face, though his lips are now cast down. I can imagine him in his former glory, clothed in silks and gold, his war band tearing through our pristine land, raping and plundering as they went. His kind once threatened our survival with their decadence. Long since defeated now, we let the last of them live in filth, since it is ungodly to strike a man down in surrender, with his hands over his head, prostrate on the ground.

This is the difference between him and I. For one of us, in defeat, must pay for his sins against us and give penance to a world that they have wronged. I on the other hand, a victor of nobler stock, must keep an ever watchful eye, and if necessary kick him back into the gutter.

And so I sit down on my stoop, a safe distance from the man, my cap outstretched to passersby. Secure in my place and the place of my kin.