Schadenfreude/ Wipewitaleaf Part 3
The Trip to Wipewitaleaf Part 3
Schadenfreude- joy in other’s suffering
Mirko grasped the bow in his rough hands, calloused from afternoons spent bashing rocks together to form spear tips in his backyard. “Alright Mirko, on my signal. One, two, HIT THOSE VC SCUM WHERE IT HURTS!” Shouted Cobra, his face a red tangle of bulging veins peeking out from his leafy costume. As Mirko drew the bow back, a grey squirrel emerged from behind a tree and skittered in front of the target. Rosie pointed at the woodland creature. “Look at the cute squirrel!” Mirko, adjusting his aim, let go of the bowstring and WHOOOSH the arrow careened through the air and THUNK pierced directly through the eyeball of the squirrel, pinning its twitching body to the sandbag. As his classmates shrieked in varied degrees of horror, Mirko allowed himself a rare smirk, a pre-programmed elicitation of his Soviet schadenfreude. Cobra patted Mirko on the back. “Good shot, sniper”. He took the bow from his hands and quickly reloaded another arrow from his quiver. He drew back the bow and let fly, landing another arrow flush into the bulbous midsection of the squirrel. The twitching subsided. More screams from the class.
Never one for much soothing, Cobra spoke to the children as if they were fellow members of the 11th infantry brigade. “What? Would you rather have seen it squirm and suffer? We’re in the jungle. Out here, it’s kill or be killed. And it’s better to be the killer than to be the rice farmer doused in napalm, his skin melting away as he runs down the muddy streets of his village, past the corroded bodies of women and children, past the thicket huts turned to Swiss cheese by the bullets rained down on them from the machine gun choppers up above”.
Many of the girls huddled together and collectively sobbed. Rosie tugged at the arm of one of the chaperones. “Can we go home now? I’m scared”. Even the boys who put on the toughest of appearances looked visibly rattled. “Well, that about does it for archery training. I’ll walk you back to the mess hall for dinner. Everyone cheer up! River’s been foraging all day for a shroom-centric feast she likes to call ‘a tour of the fungi’ that’ll set your taste buds alight.”
*The students sulked on over to the mess hall. There, they struggled to put down a five-course tasting menu made up entirely of locally foraged mushrooms. At the behest of many of the students, one of the dads tried to order a few large pepperoni pies, but his cell service was too poor and the stoner on the other end of the line couldn’t make out what he was saying. The dads discussed the contraband they had snuck into Wipewitaleaf. Between them, they had two packs of Cheez-its Snap’d White Cheddar, and a half-eaten bag of Haribo twin snakes. They agreed to wait until the students were asleep that night before sneaking out to the campfire to dine in secrecy. Back at the bunks, the girls practiced the latest Tik Tok dance trends. The boys had a fantasy draft of all the hottest girls in their grade. They placed unfair weight on the girls who had begun puberty, picking many of them higher than their underdeveloped counterparts. Eric regaled them with stories of his trip to Florida where he saw his hot older second cousin in a bikini. That night, many of them had the same nightmare about a titanic squirrel akin to Godzilla swatting US Army Chinooks out of the sky and frying desperate paratroopers with his napalm beam.*