Hinemihi

On a tiny speck of dust in an infinite universe, there is a girl who lives in a world where Razor Cuts and pounds of Insult are sold for the price of Not Good Enoughs.

"Step right up," cheer the scales. "Step right up and see how many pounds of Heavier-Than-You-Should-Be you can buy for your Not Good Enoughs!"

Heavier-Than-You-Should-Be is often grouped under the term Insult to save people time with saying and typing all of those words and hyphens. On average, the girl earns enough Not Good Enoughs each day for three and a third pounds of Insult, and six Razor Cuts. It's a decent salary, especially as Razor Cuts are a two-for-one trade; two Not Good Enoughs for one Razor Cut. It's a good deal.

In her spare time, this girl likes to watch the colour seep into the early-morning sky, and to pretend that the clouds are pyroclastic flows from far-away mountains, as the clouds obstinately hold their greyscale pose over the houses. She thinks that the distant mountains are scarier that way. Fear makes them accurate, because they're actually really big, quite dangerous things called "volcanoes". Volcanoes sometimes get a bit miffed and blow their tops in quite a literal manner. Mountains are harmless, once they stop growing.

The girl once tried to draw a picture using only shades of white. That earned her enough Not Good Enoughs for an extra pound of Insult that day.

She filters her world through a comforting blare of Music. It feeds her a steady drip of lies about how those around her deserve many, many Not Good Enoughs; far more than she does, because she listens to the Music. The Music does not pay her any Not Good Enoughs for listening to it. Music is very narcissistic.

Sometimes, this girl likes to spend her time trying to tell herself that The-Boy-She-Thinks-She-Might-Love is an exception to the Not Good Enoughs that the Music dishes out, and that he is very poor. She tries to convince herself that, ten years from now, he'll remember the time they spent catching butterflies and chasing planes. She's not very good at that, because she knows what it feels like to have everything she wanted ripped from before her very eyes.

She has stopped missing people now. The rings under her eyes are bruised from sadness and she just feels lonely all the time. Loneliness has a decent salary of three Not Good Enoughs per day.

The girl sometimes feels vulnerable and wants to be held, or pulled under and drowned in love or water; she can never decide which would best fix the problem. Vulnerability helps Loneliness and You-Will-Never-Be-Truly-Loved to pay her bonus Not Good Enoughs.

The girl's name is Hinemihi. Most people with names that pretty are poor, but she's a Spoilt-Little-Rich-Girl. The most popular language of the insignificant speck-of-dust that she lives on likes to call the insignificant speck-of-dust "Earth". It's made of two thirds water, and one third land that girls and boys like Hinemihi and The-Boy-She-Thinks-She-Might-Love like to stomp all over and grind to bits because they think that they own it. There are lots of different currencies on Earth. Most people don't have much of any of them. Not Good Enoughs are also a currency, but most people don't like to mention that one. Most people like to be poor in Not Good Enoughs and rich in everything else.

Would you want to be rich if your income was Inferiority?