Peasants

Jimmy the peasant works at the village newspaper making entertaining stories representing his master's viewpoints. Michael the peasant works at a wrench factory making tools for other peasants. Zack the peasant works at Peasant Shack making inexpensive stew that field hands pick up on their way home, happy to devour whatever cheap ingredients were hastily thrown together and overcooked.

One day the peasants decided they were freemen. As independent agents equal to nobility but without the official titles or responsibilities, they rejected uniforms, yet remained instantly identifiable by the way they carried themselves. They rejected specialization, yet developed no secondary skills and displayed no talents. Their occupations irreversibly scarred them, carving easily discernible ridges into their faces and stuttered pensiveness into their gaits.

After giving themselves freedom, they set about devoting themselves to higher callings of an unspecified nature. Except first they had to report to their daily jobs. After jostling all day with other ingrate peasants, they returned to their shacks, exhausted, too tired to reflect that their shelter was low grade construction shabbily thrown together by unskilled peasants working for pay, then marketed and sold as a well built structure by a lying peasant salesman eager for his commission. At every level the peasants scrap and corrupt unchecked, cheating one another out of good outcomes for temporary advantage. The whole society left in their hands was condemned to peasanthood. To be fair, none of the things they touched were really supposed to work. After all, they are made by peasants, for peasants, crooked and half-broken from birth.

The working men are given a day of rest, spent on drinking, amusements, fighting, and fornicating with the peasant girls from the village and nearby. Couples form from this ritual of dysfunctional socialization, especially in the spring and late fall when sharing sex and dependency has the most allure. Most peasants eventually get married and have children, a cycle renewing bodies that are used up by the churn. Sometimes a trinketmaker married a buttonpusher, occasionally a papershuffler married another papershuffler. The marriage itself didn't really matter, as they were just listless peasants, and someone was going to marry someone else anyway for neither gain or loss, just a mutual null. It turned out that no marriage ever mattered much, as everyone was allowed to get married and then the two had to make due with the consequences of their decision, the practical considerations overwhelming greater possibilities. Nor was their meager skill a factor either in union or dissolution, as there was no great need in the world for workers of any particular occupation.

In all the hustle and bustle offered by a drunken day of idling, a peasant could easily become swept away by a devilish mix of romance, optimism, and lust, seeing something special in a peasant girl, thinking her somehow different from the rest and all that had come before in the village, but this enchantment was illusion. Years came and went in the rolling cycle. Girls, boys, couples, and babies filled the stage and played out the plot. For all the promises that were so close for each couple, nothing interesting or ambitious was ever attempted, nor any inspired spark igniting before a fizzle, just the lingering dull hum of peasantry.