The Daily Drabble--"The Favorite Son"

[dawn_felagund]

invidious \in-VID-ee-uhs\, adjective:

1. Tending to provoke envy, resentment, or ill will.
   
2. Containing or implying a slight.
3. Envious.

Examples
"But to the human hordes of Amorites -- Semitic nomads wandering the mountains and deserts just beyond the pale of Sumer -- the tiered and clustered cities, strung out along the green banks of the meandering Euphrates like a giant's necklace of polished stone, seemed shining things, each surmounted by a wondrous temple and ziggurat dedicated to the city's god-protector, each city noted for some specialty -- all invidious reminders of what the nomads did not possess."
-Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews

"In his experience people were seldom happier for having learned what they were missing, and all Europe had done for his wife was encourage her natural inclination toward bitter and invidious comparison."
-Richard Russo, Empire Falls

"The lover's obsessiveness may also take the form of invidious comparisons between himself, or herself, and the rival."
-Ethel S. Person, "Love Triangles," The Atlantic, February 1988

"For five decades, Indian liberals, and some from Europe and America, have been shaming the Western world with its commercialism, making invidious comparisons with Indian spirituality."
-Leland Hazard, "Strong Medicine for India," The Atlantic, December 1965

Etymology
Invidious is from Latin invidiosus, "envious, hateful, causing hate or ill-feeling," from invidia, "envy," from invidere, "to look upon with the evil eye, to look maliciously upon, to envy," from in-, "upon" + videre, "to look at, to see."

Today's drabble takes the PoV on Fingolfin. I used to not be very fond of Fingolfin, but taking his PoV once or twice during AMC made me have some heart for the guy. (Don't tell Feanor!)


The Favorite Son
My hands clench upon the arms of the chair; my teeth worry my lip until it bleeds. It is a slow fight, a painful fight, and one from which I rarely emerge unscathed. A fight against myself.

Watching my father with my half-brother, locked in an embrace: these are not tears in my eyes; my fingernails are not rending the flesh of my own palms; it is not bitterness accounting for the pounding of my invidious heart.

The narrowing of vision-seeing only them-excludes my wife and son from sight. Excludes my brother, my mother.

It sees only them.