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Klein had been a weird kid.

He didn't have a 'type A personality,' whatever that was. He was never going to be an 'alpha male.' He didn't enjoy team sports. He wasn't a team player. He was the strange, weird kid who would sit in the corner trying not to draw attention to himself. He kept most of his reflections on the world around him to himself, forming his impressions about things from a distance whenever he could afford to. He'd learned to mistrust drawing attention as negative.

Klein's parents owned a North American clothing corporation that owned fabric factories in China and Brazil. While they'd still kept the name Klein because of the market value that had become associated with it, they'd converted from Judaism to Christianity long before Klein had been born. When he was a child, it was a church that he would get dragged to, not to a synagogue. He had never asked them why.

He didn't want to assume that it was only because they'd realized that becoming Christians would make it easier for them to fit in among other Christians. Certainly they weren't the first to convert from one religion to another for their own reasons and, in general, he didn't think that it would've been right for him to have made inferences about their motivations. The reason it occurred to him was that his parents, in particular, would always encourage him to put a lot of effort into keeping up appearances among others and to do everything he could to fit in at school as well as in the world at large. Whether or not it was true, it would've been consistent.

Most mammals still had an incrementally easier time than most reptiles, although outright hostility between most mammals and most reptiles was a thing of the distant past. Even among the furred themselves, there were many who thought that not all mammals had been created equal. While there was the understanding that humanoid animals were different from their feral namesakes, it was easy to become categorized based on symbols derived from one's feral origin.

For example, people liked to try to scam, trick or otherwise deceive fish somehow, because they imagined, based on fishing, that fish were supposed to be especially easy to fool. Scammers liked being able to say that a fish had swallowed their lies 'hook, line and sinker,' reveling in the sense of superiority that they derived from their demeaning terminology. Religious fish were often accused of believing only because they were so easy to fool.

Klein was a skunk.

As a child, some of the other children bullied him by staying pointedly away from him and pretending that he stank, because skunks were supposed to stink. They told him that he would chase girls but that he would never catch one because they would always run away from him before he could get to them, because they could smell his stink from so far away. When allergies had made him sneeze at school, the other students had made fun of him by saying that they hadn't done anything to threaten him so he shouldn't have had any reason to spray them. He began to wash his hands obsessively, until they bled, afraid someone would smell stink on him.

He began to believe that perhaps life would've been better if he hadn't been born a skunk. If only he could've converted to a different species that wouldn't have made him be quite so made fun of. Of course, schoolyard bullies picked on reptiles, fish, bats, bugs, hybrids - anyone different, really. But it's the nature of bullying that it atomizes its victims, making them feel like their alienation separates them from everyone else to contribute to their alienation.

He wanted to paint his tail black, but everyone at school already knew him, and it would've seemed like something that someone would've done in a cartoon. With his luck all it would've done would've been to have drawn even more attacks than before. He knew people whose parents were far worse to than his were to him, but that didn't mean he got along with them. In any case they certainly weren't going to help with bullying that they blamed on him in the first place. As far as they were concerned, it was his job to win his peers' approval and, if he failed, they would be disappointed because of the shame that his failure would've brought them.

They wanted him to take over their corporation when they would retire and, when he would, it would be important for him to know how to maintain the best image possible for the company as a whole. How could he ever manage this if he could not even learn how to maintain a good image around his schoolmates? So Klein began to think about how people managed the impressions that other people had of them, about how people communicated through images in daily life. They made clothes, and clothes made the man. Men like him were supposed to be obsessed with clothes anyway, but for him, it went a little deeper than the stereotype implied.

Even the white stripes on his back were an inadvertent symbol that communicated something to others when they saw it. Among feral skunks in the wild, it was a warning to predators to stay away, or that they would get what would be coming to them. As a humanoid skunk, though, the symbol's interpretation was turned back against him, branding him as a pariah like the Mark of the Beast.

It occurred to him that the stripes themselves were a kind of advertisement, just as the clothes that people wore were. He had never sprayed anyone, although he'd threatened a bully who'd cornered him with it once. The bully had been so scared of getting sprayed that he'd soiled himself and ran. But he blamed the stench on him on Klein, claiming he really had sprayed him. He wondered if he would ever find a way to make being a skunk work for him.

His parents tried to use their money to get him to behave. They would spend a lot on promises to buy him things to reward him for doing what they wanted, or they would threaten to take things away to punish him for not doing what they wanted. In the end he ended up finding perverse pleasure in wanting as few things as he could in the first place, to sabotage their attempts at manipulation. He strove to become an ascetic out of spite, and desire for freedom.

He did get attached to things, though. How could he not?

Since the bullying he endured at school had made it seem like a better idea to try to have a good time on his own than to waste his time trying to please others who would only hurt him, he ended up spending a lot of time on his own, some of it outdoors but some of it indoors. The more time he spent inside on his own, the more he couldn't help allowing himself to become attached to his books, movies, games, and plushies. In a sense, they were the companions who were willing to spend time with him without judging him, the friends he couldn't make at school. It became a comforting ritual for him to say good night to them before going to bed each night.

He'd still thought of himself as a Christian in high school, even though he wasn't always sure of what that meant. The first other belief system he'd learned about that'd drawn his interest had been animism. On an intellectual level, he fully understood that the objects he owned and liked weren't going to start singing back to him like they would in a Disney cartoon, but on an emotional level, still being able to treat certain objects like people felt like it was good for him. It seemed to him as though, as long as he could keep his expectations about the real world realistic themselves, there could be no harm in a bit of fantasy, daydreams and roleplay, could there?

At the time, his conception of good was the one that he'd imagined based on his Christian upbringing. No killing - except in self-defense or war. No stealing - except from the rich to give to the poor. No lying - except lying to a Nazi about where a Jewish person hid. He learned that, historically, Christianity had had a dim view of animism, which it had branded with the unflattering moniker of idolatry. He wondered if there could be extenuating circumstances for it.

Hadn't the law been made for people, rather than people having been made for the law?

Frustrated with this seeming obstacle to pursuing animism, Klein began to look for loopholes in his religion that would still allow him to pursue other ones. As a teenager, when he would be dragged to church, his attention became drawn by a griffin his age who sang in the choir. Half-panther, half-raven, the hybrid's voice made him sound like an angel. The skunk began to look forward to his voice much more than to any of the sermons he would hear there.

Tentatively, Klein went up to him and started talking to him after one of his performances. The griffin acted just like a normal kid, but he was very soft-spoken, with a gentle, slightly effeminate vibe about his demeanor that made the skunk suspect that he might play for the same team as he did. They started talking to each other about random things, as kids were wont to do, and they progressively became friends.

When Klein came out to him, the griffin called him a fag and told him to fuck off. He told the skunk that, if he ever talked to him again, the griffin would call him out as a stalker and have him excommunicated for being a pervert, before storming off in a huff. Klein knew that, if he could no longer come to the church, his parents would have wanted an explanation from him, which would have risked outing him to them.

Klein had cried, feeling spurned both as a friend and by someone who he hadn't even admitted to that he'd had a crush on. His bitterness toward dogma grew, and he began to question whether he truly belonged with other Christians. Sometimes he even wondered whether they could be right about him going to hell or not. He learned that the Latin word for skunk was the same as for the devil: mephit, the stinky one. He wasn't sure of how to feel about it. Part of him worried it meant that sin was etched into his very nature. Part of him wanted to embrace it, and to draw from its power that he'd always feared so.

He began to feel that it wasn't safe for him to admit to being attracted to other men, as someone who lived in a world where people were going to be reacting to it the way that griffin boy had. He would have to come up with a strategic response to this. As painful as what had happened to him had been for him, he knew fully well that, compared to many others, he'd been relatively lucky. Many others like him who had come out hadn't fared nearly as well as he had.

There was always the risk of violence.

For a long time, he had resisted the notion of buying pepper spray because, if he were attacked, he didn't want to appear in some headline talking about a skunk having sprayed someone. It was this incident that finally made him reconsider his viewpoint to start carrying some after all. He realized that, if he died because he was concerned about how living would make him look, it would've been a cruel victory for the reign of appearances imposed on him.

He figured that his best shot at not becoming a target for anti-gay violence was to try to stop being gay altogether, just like people wanted him to. People talked about having done it all the time, it couldn't have been that hard, he'd tried to tell himself. In college, he'd started dating a lioness who had just joined the police force.

He grew to hate the police.

At first, he'd admired her because she'd been a woman working in a position of power that had traditionally been held by men, so he thought of her as one in a long line of trailblazers. In time he often had to put up with her rants about how much she'd loathed feminists. She'd say that she'd believed in the meritocracy above all else, that she'd personally fought very hard to deserve to get where she was. She didn't want what she saw as pity, and she didn't want other women getting through to meet some quota because men like him felt guilty about it. She was 'one of the good ones' and proud of it. Her male co-workers liked her a great deal for it.

At first, she had kind of liked that Klein had been sort of a pipsqueak who she felt that she could lead around. She'd liked the idea of being a leader, of being in control. In time, she became sick of what she saw as his weakness, as his inability to live up to her ideal of what a real man should have been. She'd believed that she drew her skill at catching criminals from her lioness hunting instinct, playing into the trope without a second thought. She'd talked about criminals, even minor offenders, as prey, as slabs of meat to hunt down and kill. He'd become disgusted by the way she'd talked about them, and frightened by her obsession with firearms.

And she'd hated his clothes. She'd criticized them all the time. She'd told him he stank.

She'd believed that, on a basic level, people were fundamentally evil, and would only do evil to others if left to their own devices. It was only by being subjected to strict authoritarian control that people could be forced to be good, she'd argue, so every control could be justified by the fact that it was the only way to have a society in which people would be good. It'd seemed to him that any control should've had to justify the restrictions it imposed on people's freedoms, but he'd known better than to argue with her about it. He'd never seen her change her mind about anything.

The more he'd thought about it, the more her view of the world had made him think about his religion differently. The idea that if you followed a certain set of rules, you would go to heaven and that if you broke them, you would go to hell began to seem like transparent manipulation to him. It occurred to him that whichever people were in charge of ascribing these rules to God could simply use it to blackmail everyone into doing whatever served their interests, even if it went against the interests of believers themselves.

Beyond that, even if he took the idea of the reality of God at face value, he began to question what kind of God would have used such a Skinnerian system of rewards and punishment to condition people according to a set of standards that made sense only to Him. If someone only helped someone because they would be eternally rewarded for it, or only out of fear of being eternally punished, was it really so generous of them? Or did it reduce every positive human interaction to mere calculations? He couldn't help but think that it would be better to help others because one wanted them to get better, because one cared about them.

He'd hated what he'd read about his parents' company. Their reputation for how they'd treated their workers was dismal at best, but they were doing well enough financially that they'd decided they didn't have to care. When he'd been in college, his parents had started temporarily putting him in charge of supervision at one of their fabric factories. He hadn't thought of himself as a leader, and hadn't liked the idea of having to be in charge of anything, but they hadn't cared.

He hadn't thought that he'd received enough of the proper training to know what he'd be doing well enough, but they'd told him that it hadn't mattered because he'd be going to learn on the job. Having to work in-between classes had been exhausting. At least his classes had been interesting. During one of his college history classes, an archaeopteryx teacher of his had projected a symbol on the chalkboard that had immediately spoken to him.

It had been the yin/yang symbol.

As soon as Klein had seen it, he had felt a sense of identification with it, because of the black within the white and the white within the black that were inscribed on his own body. The class about Daoism that followed had changed his spiritual perspective irremediably. Daoism could technically be either a religion or a philosophy. He figured that, as long as he thought of it as a philosophy, he could get away with adhering to it without angering an insecure, jealous God. Daoism had made him feel that it was okay for him not to want to be a leader, and for him to value people's freedom over other people's desire to control them.

It made him feel that he shouldn't have had to change himself to meet the expectations of others, that it had been okay to accept himself the way he was. It made him feel like the names that he'd been called growing up had just been words that bullies had come up with to describe the limits of their own minds, that the concepts that had been presented to him as absolutes like what it meant to be a real man had been completely relative. It made him wonder what else he'd never been taught at school, that he'd only be able to learn from experience when he'd go out into the world. If being a skunk had brought it to his attention, maybe it didn't have to be so bad.

One Daoist story in particular had stuck out in his mind when he'd first heard it because of how it'd resonated with his own life as well. It was called 'Feeding The Clothes.' In it, a sage showed up at a friend's house in common clothes, only to be turned away by the help at the door. After returning in his sage's robe and being let in, he began to stuff his pockets with food at the dinner table. When asked about it, he'd answered that 'Since it's clearly my clothes that have really been invited here, not me, it seems only fair that they should be the ones who should be fed your dinner, doesn't it?'

When his exhaustion and lack of training caught up with him while working as a supervisor in one of his parents' factories, he made a rookie mistake that caused one of the workers who worked there to lose one of his arms in one of the fabric machines. Wracked with guilt, Klein wanted to quit on the spot, and he begged his parents to make sure that the wounded worker would receive worker's compensation from them because of what had happened to him.

His parents told him that the worker had been fired for his incompetence and that he would receive nothing. Any admission of guilt on their part would have made the company look terrible. They'd dismissed his desire to quit as a panic reaction that he should shrug off as well. They'd told him that it'd been more important for him to think about the long-term well-being of their company than about how he felt about a stranger right now, to get his priorities straight. Nepotism existed for a reason, and all builders of great empires had had to make sacrifices and to learn to put their own interests first. You had to break some eggs to make an omelet, didn't you?

At that point he really did feel like he had been 'feeding the clothes,' but in a much ghastlier, unanticipated way. He felt as though the entire fabric factory, and possibly the entire clothing industry by extension, was just this big, gigantic monster and that, by sacrificing their workers' lives to have them be engulfed by this monster, his parents were feeding it, like collaborators securing their own advantage by feeding other people to a dark and evil god.

He thought about the meaning of 'wu wei.'

All his life, he had felt rushed into making rash decisions that had ended up being bad for him and bad for other people because he had felt compelled to give in to social pressure. The idea that he could react to social pressure by calmly saying 'No, I don't think I'm going to do that' had never fully occurred to him, or at least never with this level of emotional clarity. If there had ever been a time for him to learn to make decisions on his own terms, it'd been now.

That night, Klein renounced Christianity, broke up with his girlfriend, quit his job, dropped out of college, and ran away from home into the wilderness.