Veracity by Mark Lavorato

my faith in what we are.
    I got out of bed and stretched beside it, looking into the tangle of bushes and vines inside the garden, which had a rectangular path around it that had been cleared for walking. Then, I looked down the corridor and noticed that the door was ajar.
    At that same moment, there was a muffled rustling, as of clothing in movement, which was coming from a recess in the courtyard that I hadn't noticed before. I stepped forward to see who it was.
    "Did you solve your problem with the monkey?" asked Dana, who was sitting at a small table, apparently waiting for me to stick my head around the corner.
    "What?"
    "I heard you mumble 'stupid monkey' a few minutes ago."
    "Oh, yeah. Solved." I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.
    "Good. Then come, have a seat with me," he said, eyeing the only other chair at the table. Both of his hands were wrapped around a cup of steaming liquid, which smelled of pepper leaf tea, and one of his legs was casually draped over the other. He brought the cup to his mouth and sent a few swirls of steam eddying into the air before sipping from it.
    Dana was a thin man, whose movements were always slow, his gestures methodical, deliberate. He had long curly hair that was aging and stranded in rusted colours, ranging from brown to grey. His beard, which shared the same varying colour, was longer and much more unkempt than Harek's. As the light material for our clothes was produced from the fibres of certain plants on the island, the cloth was naturally beige, but Dana took to privately dying his shirts with a kind of berry, which produced a pale maroon colour. I once speculated that this might be a way of separating himself from the rest of the Elders, though, really, it might also just have been his taste.
    I walked over and sat on the other side of the wooden table, both of us angling toward the courtyard where a few small songbirds, hidden from view, were singing away. I was happy to have the chance to speak with him. Out of all the Elders, I held him in the highest regard, hung on his words, and pondered them carefully. For my part, we seemed to get along quite well together, or at least seemed to feel at ease in each other's company.
    "I've come by to see how you're coping with things, and also to begin answering some of the questions that I'm sure have begun to spring up." He said this last sentence while turning his head in my direction, opening his eyes as the last words were spoken. This was one of his peculiarities. Often when speaking with him, he would look away for quite some time, and would keep his eyes closed when turning back to face you, and then open them when he imagined they would be aiming at your face. It was a touch odd.
    "Well," I mumbled, picking a tiny dead leaf off the table between us and throwing it to the ground, "I think I'm doing alright. We're not the greatest creatures, but there's something we can do about it, right?"
    Dana looked at me as if I'd just spat onto the table between us. He lowered his eyebrows, focusing on my face. "Is that what you got out of the conversation with Harek yesterday?"
    I shifted in my seat. "Well, yeah - basically."
    It took him a few uncomfortable seconds to react to this. He was dumbfounded, almost lost for words. His mouth formed several different vowels before he finally decided on what to say. "Harek... told you about denial, didn't he?"
    My voice was soft, "Yes." I knew what was meant by it.
    "Because I can't imagine him ever saying the words: 'we're not the greatest creatures, but there's something we can do about it', as that's completely inaccurate. Firstly, there is nothing we can do about what we are. And secondly, what we are is the darkest, most evil animal the fossil record has ever seen, and we had hoped you were on your way to at least understanding a little bit of that."
    "Oh," I said. I put my hands on the table and started fiddling with them. This wasn't easy. Because I might be able to admit to the fact that we