Litany Of The Hole

Anthony Adrian Acker

03-11-2025

There was a boy born into the world. He was exceptional, brilliant, and gifted. But the world labeled him broken, diagnosed him with disorders, and fed him pills.
The boy had a love for life, but a pain deep inside him was growing. The pain allowed him to see the world for what it really was.
As the boy grew up, he realized he was living in a hole in the ground. He began to also realize that the hole was filling up with people, people who were not like him. People who were more NPC than sentient. The world outside the hole was lush, verdant, abundant, and beautiful. It was warm and full of light. The hole was wet, and it smelled.
The years piled on, the hole grew denser in population. The people were fed gruel that made them fat and happy, but the boy stopped eating their feed. The boy didn’t like how the pills and the food made him feel.

The boy began to question things and started to make plans to help everyone get out of the hole. The boy shouted, “I think I know how to get us out of this hole! If we work together, we can hoist each other out, and then we can pull more people out of the hole! We will be free!”
Everyone turned on the boy and screamed at him and beat him up.
“Shut up, boy! Who asked you?”
“Nobody wants your answers, stop trying to fix things!”
“We are comfortable here! Stop trying to change us!”
“That sounds too hard!”
“That’s too much work!”
And the boy grew silent.

The people began to fight amongst themselves over each other’s opinions about the same things. The people came up with reasons to be mad at one another. They judged each other. And they hated each other. The boy just sat back and watched. The boy’s heart was still full of love and light.

The hole was becoming filthy and repulsive. The people, instead of cleaning and working together, began to hate the hole, and they began to make it filthier. The boy tried to show everyone that they were making a mess, but they screamed at him and told him people would be better off dying in the filth than having to clean. They felt oppressed and only dug their heels in the shit deeper.

One day, a stranger came to the edge of the hole. He spoke into the hole and threw in a rope. He pulled a few people out, and then they walked away. The people turned violent and vitriolic because these people were chosen. They hated them because they rose up out of the hole.
Every time one of these people was given the chance to climb out of the hole, they did so, without ever looking back and offering a hand.
As the population of the hole slowly withered away, the craziest and most toxic of the people were left. The boy watched as the world above decayed and withered away. Eventually, fires and war destroyed nearly everything. And the boy could hear the people above crying and screaming in pain.
The last few crazies left in the hole were rabidly clawing for a way out. They begged and pleaded for the man to come back and throw down his rope. But he never came for them. They fought amongst themselves and took their own lives because they couldn’t stand not being chosen.

The boy sat alone in the hole. He sat, and he kept himself busy. He learned everything he could. He enjoyed life as best he could. Every now and then, he would look up out of the hole and be reminded that the world was not what he once saw, that things were different now.
Sure, the boy wished he too could find a hand reaching down for him to grab onto, to perchance be allowed to live amongst the rest of the people. But the hand never came, and the boy grew into a man.
The man had everything he needed, and nobody to tell him how to live. The man found happiness where he could, even if he had to make his own happiness.

One day, the stranger with the rope came back.
He stood at the edge of the hole where the boy had grown into a man.
The stranger called down, “Boy, if you are ready to behave, to listen, to stop trying to change things, we have a place for you in our world.”

The boy who became a man pondered for many minutes on this deal.
Just as the stranger began to lose his patience, the boy inside the man spoke up.

“I have watched you come and save those around me, who never turned back to help another. I have watched the world outside die, poisoned by the ones you pulled out of this hole.

Why should I now want to be a part of your world when I could have helped change things for the better?

No, I will stay here, in my hole, where I have made my home, where I have found peace.”