Who do you love?

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire,
I use a cobra-snake for a necktie,
I got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made from rattlesnake hide,
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of a human skull,
Now come on take a walk with me, [Aleen],
And tell me, who do you love?

As terrifying as these lyrics are when one thinks about them too long, they simply serve to communicate an all-too common story. The bad boy, the weird one, the one all the girls hang on and adore, turns out to be more than just a little odd, and one by one the girls find out just what this means...but by then it is too late. They stepped across an unseen line and have joined the piles of bodies buried in fields, in backyards, thrown into the forest to be devoured. We all see the pattern, everyone knows that it's there, but no one likes to talk about it. Why? It's scary, unsettling; it makes us think what if that happened to me? People like to ignore the unpleasant truths of “reality,” instead focusing on happy things, but that changes when it's just a story.

“It's fiction,” we say, “not truth. Not truth at all.” But it is true, whether we admit it or not. Even the cleverest of authors only manages to retell a story that has been told many times before. Perhaps he adds a new detail that no-one had added before, perhaps he changes the where or the why or the how, but at the root the story is still the same. Humans are too blind to see this, too blind to realize that it all comes back to the very first story, the root of it all. What can we do to make ourselves see?

As Ashley pointed out, a lot of people have mentioned what should have happened. Perhaps a better question would be what would I have done? This ties in with the question how do I know what I think till I see what I say, although perhaps it would be more accurate to say till I see what I do. None of us knows how we would react in that sort of a situation. Certainly, we can say, “I wouldn't have been so stupid. I would have locked the door, called the police straight off,” but how can we know that unless we are there? Perhaps if you were that small girl, heart gripped with terror—she must have known what would happen when she stepped out that door—perhaps you too would forget reason, forget what “should have been done” in the incredible panic that washed over you as you realized you would never see this place again, never feel the sun on your young face.

Perhaps even more terrifying than Connie's sad tale is the story of the pied piper of Tuscon, because it is, in fact, a part of that little piece of the world we call reality. It's not just another made-up fairytale. It's tears and blood and bone, fleshed-out and horrific in the fact that it could have been stopped if people had not kept their mouths shut. In reading both of the stories, the lines between what is reality and what is fiction grow blurred. The two clash in the books that the man wears, the gold car, the girl at home alone, making friends that her parents don't approve of. She is far over her head even before she realizes what is going on around her. And once she knows what she should have done, it's too late.