On March the 31st I was vigilant in reminding myself to beware the events of the following day.
“Be wary, Zara!” I cried. “There are those who would tease and trick you; know that every seeming good deed has the potential to be wickedness in disguise! Spurn those who offer you mysterious items, disbelieve those who tell you improbable facts! It is all lies and deceit. Keep your wits about you and no one will be able to succeed in their pranks.”
“Righty-ho, Zara,” I said amiably.
The next day dawned bright with promise. And for once I was sensible; I remembered my advice from the day before. So when a certain person, with a suspicious aura of friendliness, gave me a letter and a mysterious box, I smirked to myself and thought, Aha! A trick this must certainly be!
I opened the letter and began to read. My suspicions were confirmed. I will not go into detail as to the contents of the letter, but the general gist of it was that the person who’d given me the letter felt strong feelings of a romantic nature for me, which were described in a creatively poetic fashion. The culmination of the letter said that he had enclosed a small token of his affection for me inside the box.
To be truly honest, I was secretly quite hurt. You see, this is someone I would probably genuinely like a love letter from, and here he was, giving me one as a joke, either unaware of or mocking my feelings for them.
But if I have one talent, it is being able to act and pretend that I don’t actually have any feelings for someone at all. It’s an ability I have been obliged to cultivate over the years and I have refined it into an art form. Therefore I was able to turn to my supposed admirer, who stood watching me read the letter with a slight smirk marring his otherwise hopeful look. I gazed into his eyes. I told him all the things I wished I could actually say to him. But I exaggerated my words, turning truth into farce. I graced them with an exquisitely subtle touch of sarcasm. In this way I laughed off his letter and disguised my true feelings.
“Ah! You move me with your declaration of love!” I cried. “A blaze of warmth fills the barest reaches of my heart. Do you know how long I have pined for you, longed for you? Thoughts of you occupy my mind with painful constancy; I dream of no one else. To discover you feel the same way for me fills me with indescribable joy. It near overwhelms me! I feel like I must faint from happiness!” I swooned against a table, casting my hand across my forehead in dramatic fashion and fluttering my eyelids. I was confident I looked and sounded ridiculous. Certainly frequent spasms, probably of suppressed laughter, disfigured his face.
I picked up the box and clutched it to my heart. “I am breathless with anticipation to discover what you have given me!” I said. I was beginning to really enjoy myself and looked forward to waxing lyrical about whatever pathetic object was in the box. I was certain the box would contain something that obviously contradicted the contents of his letter.
I was right. Horribly, gruesomely right.
Inside the box was a severed duck head.
I found myself unable to speak. Thoughts whirled around my head, refusing to take tangible form. My eyes tried to deny what it was I was seeing.
A duck head. An actual, real duck head, that once belonged to a living, breathing, quacking duck.
I love ducks. They’re so cute and feathery and they waddle about looking very silly. A couple of months ago I wandered into the kitchen at work and saw a dead, plucked duck defrosting in the sink. It was incredibly heart wrenching. I'd spent most of the afternoon feeling weepy. I’d never cried over a dead animal before. Now, I know I’ve been officially vegetarian for over two years now, but I’d always been quite bad in that I’d often succumb to the temptation to eat meat. But after the defrosting duck incident all desire for meat vanished.
This person knew I was vegetarian. This person knew how much the dead duck had affected me. By giving me a duck head they went beyond simple pranking. This was just plain malicious.
I felt intense anger rising in me. I didn’t know how to react to it; I almost never get angry. I didn’t know whether I wanted to cry or shout or hit him in the face. How dare he treat me this way? First he laughs at my feelings for him; now he tramples my ethics and principles. I was so livid. I can’t remember ever feeling so angry. In fact, I became so enraged I resorted to a dramatic solution: I woke up.
I lay in my bed with the sun streaming in through my window. I felt extremely disorientated. Fury was still causing the blood to race through my veins and I was thinking uncharitable thoughts about someone I usually like far more than is seemly. Eventually, though, reason began to return to me.
Somehow, I had dreamed a dream and thought it true. This dream instilled surprisingly strong feelings of anger in me. I’d been fooled.
And then it clicked! My subconscious brain had succeeded in pranking me. Me! I’d pranked myself and hadn’t even realized I was doing it! Far from being angry, I felt instead affection and pride towards myself, coupled with a strong sense of amusement.
“Heheh. Zara – you are too clever!” I exclaimed.
“I know,” I replied modestly.
“Seriously! To pull off a decent prank require conscious forethought and planning – but you just did it! We occupy the same mind space and I didn’t even know you were tricking me! That I tricked me! HAH! I’m so awesome! I bet no one else can do that.”
“Yes. Possibly. Or maybe you’re just way more gullible than everyone else. You’re so silly you fall for your own jokes.”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, still cackling with glee. “Don’t kill my buzz. This is too cool.”
Yes, Zara, I thought. This was cool. Mwa. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
True story.
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