Page 12 of Culture and Curiosities
Who else had come?
Oh, the Scottish men…but no…Daddy didn’t have an accent.
“Yeah, it’s built on a variety of languages and that makes it confusing. Did you know moose and goose have different origins? It’s so weird but that’s why English has geese but not meese.” It was a good fact but Daddy had to think.
He needed to think a lot.
“That does explain some of the strange…variations in language.” He’d responded but I could almost hear the wheels in his head spinning faster and faster. “Why does temperature indicate sexual arousal?”
Oh, that was a good question.
“Maybe because looking at someone you really want to touch and kiss and snuggle and get spanked by makes you flash hot?” If there was a better reason I couldn’t think of it. “Sometimes phrases like that come from movies or books that were popular a long time ago. Like gaslighting. That comes from a movie. It’s really old but it was good.”
That guy was a dick and that lady was going to need a lot of therapy.
“Oh. That would explain it. I wonder if Klynn has run into any of those in his reading yet.” Daddy blinked but didn’t seem to realize that sentence didn’t have enough context to make sense. “What kind of reading material do you ingest?”
Daddy paused again. “No. Consume?”
Hmm.
English was kind of weird.
“Consume works. I like things like romance novels and sci-fi, the hard kind and the dirty kind. But who doesn’t like tentacles?” Everyone around town seemed to like them but Daddy just blinked. He was easily confused.
Didn’t everyone know about tentacle porn?
There were even real romances with tentacle aliens in them that weren’t just word porn.
It was a whole genre.
Comedians made dirty jokes about it…how did he not know that?
“Um, fiction books. Stories that aren’t real and are just made up. Make believe. Books that let you play pretend about aliens and people falling in love and space.” I wasn’t sure listing off more would help, so I waited for him to think about it since books seemed confusing too.
Where could he be from where they didn’t at least have Amish romance novels?
Every library I’d ever seen had those.
“Stories.” Daddy frowned again but seemed to be processing. “Like the way poetry can tell a story but in a longer form?”
Where was he from? Mars?
Oh.
Daddy didn’t know what dirty books were.
Daddy didn’t know much about littles.
Daddy didn’t know what telling someone they were hot meant.
My mother was going to kill me.
“Yes.” Okay, we were going to explain books and then handle the other stuff. “Like sometimes cultures have stories we tell children to teach them lessons?”
When he nodded, grasping that concept, relief rushed through me. “We started there too but we kept going. Some people love telling stories, so we eventually started writing them down. Adventures and love stories…from all kinds of places and now we tell stories about alien adventures and falling in love with all kinds of people.”
Yes, that would show him I was open-minded.
