Oh, Young Jorbo

               The Big Ones came once every cycle. Where they came from and where they returned to no one knew. But their arrival always meant the same thing. Families that had grown together and experienced life together were torn apart, children and adults alike stolen from the familiar lands of ancestry. Some were spared, left to remain among their brothers and sisters, parents and children, only to pass along the horrifying stories of the Big Ones who nonchalantly took away their loved ones once each cycle. The period in the cycle that heralded the arrival of the Big Ones was known as the Times of Blood and Flame, owing to the colors of the sky and the world, whose hues foreshadowed the coming of those most feared.

               Jorbo had heard the stories like everyone else. His parents told him of the Big Ones, and his grandparents before them had passed down the tales from their ancestors. Some generations never experienced the Big Ones, and lived and died among their families with stories their only information, and peace their life’s only tale. But many generations passed in a cycle, and the unfortunate generations who lived to the Times of Blood and Flame when the Big Ones came were never left unscathed. Jorbo never thought the Big Ones would come in his lifetime. To most, they were only stories.

               Jorbo was quiet when they showed up. They were as big as the legends said they were. His parents were helpless to save him, and they were taken away with his brothers, sisters, friends. He watched as the Big Ones took them. While he wondered at the fate of his loved ones, he too was taken.

               Ancestral memory swept to the front of Jorbo’s mind, tickled with images of shared meals, shared dreams, shared homes among family through generations. A Time of Blood and Flame had come, and as predicted by the elders, so did the Big Ones. Along with four others, Jorbo was taken far away to a strange land the legends never spoke of. Elders had known nothing of what happened after one was taken. How could they? No one had ever come back from abduction by the Big Ones. There were no stories to tell, only endless speculation. But imagination and guesses were no match for reality’s bizarre truth.

               Big Ones made deafening noises without purpose, in what seemed to be constant competition for loudness for loudness’s sake. It was Jorbo’s opinion this mechanism served to instill fear and awe in him and the four strangers with whom he was abducted. It worked. Communication between Jorbo and his compatriots had ended, rendered impossible by the presence of the Big Ones.

               The four others were laid out with Jorbo, and he watched as the Big Ones cut into them, probed them with horrible instruments and jabbed mercilessly into their guts. Helpless to intervene, he waited for his turn, his senses itching at the screams of the four strangers for whom his heart ached. The horrible instruments inflicted pain the legends never spoke of, not only outside but within,  and he was cut open and tortured with godlike savagery like the rest. The Big Ones laughed and roared cheerful sounds into the air as they cut and chopped and prodded. Nerves could take only so much before consciousness began to wane. Jorbo cried out, but the four others could do nothing. All must suffer, it was clear.

               With tremendous pulls, Jorbo’s organs were ripped from his body. He was to be hollowed out like the others. The pain did not end with the removal of his organs, and life, in its ardent struggle to be preserved, held on with weak grasp. Jorbo tried to fill his mind with images of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters. The voices of his friends filled his mind and he closed himself off to the torment and anguish enveloping him. He gazed upon the four he had never known, and saw shapes viciously, messily, clumsily hacked into them. Splattered and suffered, they were, and Jorbo anticipated the same depravities upon him. The pain was worse than his longest nightmares had ever suggested.

               A brutal, ugly series of shapes were cut from him and fire was set in Jorbo’s hollowed body where his organs had been, suffering and grief his only sensations. They make us ugly, he thought. The desecration of our natural beauty to amuse and tickle them. For a greater purpose? I will never understand... Deaf and blind he was, no longer aware of his surroundings or the four he’d once been able to see. The Big Ones set the five beside one another, each with a fire flickering from its hollowed husk, through eerie shapes that meant nothing.

               Jorbo remembered the feeling of a cool breeze, and the sharing of food with his family, stories told with each season, the dew of a cool morning. How he missed his family, his friends, and hoped that wherever they were, the same fate had not met them. Perhaps they were being cared for, fed, and nurtured. The spark of life faded in Jorbo as the devastating fire burned his empty shell. Halloween had arrived.