Lesser People

LESSER PEOPLE

               A stone with fine symmetry, sharp edges like an architect’s masterpiece, and smooth surfaces as though sanded for millennia by the hands of a god soared through the air like a wingless bird. The stone’s flight was cut short by its collision with the head of a small man of less symmetry and less physical perfection. A roar of laughter burst out from across the street, and the little man picked himself off the ground and found blood trickling down his face. His head was spinning, his vision blurred, and a sharp throbbing pain engulfed his skull.

               “Your head got in the way of my rock, again!” shouted a loud man with mutton chops. The crowd behind him laughed and laughed and laughed and caught its collective breath and laughed some more.

               “You’re supposed to duck, Darwin!” yelled another man, dressed fashionably, with an air of sophistication about his voice. Laughter surrounded him.

               The little man nodded, smiled worriedly, and continued on his way.

“Look at him waddle,” said the fashionable man. “Like a penguin in the wrong part of the world.”

“Look at his head,” said the mutton-chopped man. “I think my rock might have fixed it. Doesn’t look so weird and mutant-like, does it?”

               “No, no, Rodney,” said the fashionable  man, “still he looks freakish as ever. Maybe he’ll be hit by a car on his commute, today. That’ll fix him. Maybe flatten out his bumps and stretch his bones to be normal sized.”

               “But then who will we laugh at?” asked the mutton-chopped man, in a half-laugh tone.

               “Oh, that’s a very good point. A very, very good one.”

               The laughter carried on.

               Darwin the Dwarf was a miserable fellow on the inside, but a pleasant and charming fellow on the outside. Part of what made him pleasant to people in his town was the very fact that he was a dwarf. A small, silly little man with deformed proportions and cartoonish features was quite the sight to behold, they decided. Not a person, but a thing to see. Another part of what made Darwin so pleasant to others was that he could put up with insults, jokes, degrading comments, and abusive actions all for the amusement of the locals. The people of the town were quite caught up in caring about their own lives to some tremendous degree, worrying about bucket lists and whether or not they were experiencing life to its absolute fullest.  In the exhaustion that surely comes with such a focus on fun, there grew the necessity of relaxation. Relaxation was had with a few laughs at the dwarf, cheers to his misfortune, and joviality in celebration of his lowly state.

Those who actively hurled abuse his way for the amusement of others were Rodney “Clay” Airborne—an ex-military official who spent the days in town amusing himself much like the others, and thinking lofty thoughts that gave him both a sense and an appearance of importance—and Dickroy Safari, a man of incredibly high culture and class, at the height of fashion, who was a freelance restaurant critic, self-proclaimed jack of all trades,  and a man-about-town.

               It is of course for these reasons that Darwin was a miserable fellow on the inside. Though he developed a thick skin, it didn’t mean he wasn’t always thrown into a maelstrom of misery by those he wanted to call his friends. But he had no friends, only gawkers who found his spectacle a horrid fairy tale or a whimsical nightmare. While Dickroy Safari made a habit of treating Darwin the same way he treated beasts of the wild, as a toy for personal entertainment that possessed no thoughts or feelings or awareness of its own, and certainly couldn’t understand  in big thoughtful terms just how useless a creature it was, Rodney “Clay” Airborne threw less figurative forms of assault at Darwin, more literal, with his fists, his knees, and rocks he thought looked particularly painful and sure to cause a rise out of the little creature who waddled to work each day along the sidewalk.

               Walking home from work on the same day, Darwin was met with the kind of commentary he had grown used to.

               “The thing is horrid,” said one of the townspeople. “That it should walk our streets freely makes me feel ill.”

               “Look at his legs,” said another. “Bow-legged. He’s like the wretched caricature of storybooks read to us in second grade.”

               Rodney “Clay”  Airborne stepped out of the corner bar, his breath the fragrance of juniper berry spirits. Though he liked to keep his mouth wet with alcohol, he liked to keep his mind and his imagination dry and vacant with the stories of Ernest Hemingway. He fancied himself a man’s man, found bullfighting erotic, and dabbled in boxing when the weather was warm. He was a man of unimaginative thought, and dull, yet piercing insult. After spitting a ball of phlegm to the sidewalk, he shouted at Darwin.

               “Don’t trip on your own feet!”

               Darwin blushed, tried not to look at Rodney or the crowd, and smiled as he walked along the sidewalk, toward home. Two rocks flew across his path, and a third hit him in the knee. “OOooh!” he shouted, falling to the ground.

               “Well then!” said Dickroy, arm-in-arm with a new girlfriend, a hip girl from the big city. “The little guy’s fallen on himself, again!”

               Darwin tried to stand up, but Dickroy put his foot on his head, and pushed him down into a puddle of mud and sewage beside the road.

               “Glub glub glub” was the only sound Darwin made.

               A great eruption of laughter came from the townspeople, and Dickroy was rather fond of himself for his ingenious method of disgracing the poor dwarf.

               “Rub ‘em in it hard!” yelled Rodney from across the street. “Boy’s gotta get a good taste of the mud! It’s all the dinner he needs.”

               Darwin was very hungry, and he had been so looking forward to the pies he had waiting at home, in the refrigerator. But the mud and sewage that made its way into his mouth vanquished his appetite. He threw up into the puddle, and Dickroy pushed him down into it, further smearing him in a wet pond of shame before all the town.

               Darwin tried to laugh.

The following morning during coffee, before the commute to work that would surely land stones against his cheeks, and possible kicks against his legs, the dwarf caught an advertisement in the paper for a rather unique kind of offer; a strange, but enticing opportunity. The advertisement’s narrator sounded rather convincing.

               “As the oppressive hand of poverty tightened ever so slightly, I decided to sell my body. Or rather, rent it out. Not in the traditional sexual sense, but in a new way. For a negotiable price, your consciousness can be transferred into my body while my mind finds temporary reprieve in the clouds of Limbo. What you do as the commander of this body is limited only by vague human laws and the physical limits imposed on it by my own doing.”

               Oh, to be poured into another body, another self! What possibilities awaited him when he took on a new form and a new identity! Even if only for a little while, it could be something glorious beyond all possibilities of human comprehension.  He wondered whose body he could take. He cut out the ad and finished reading, before pocketing it. But the rest of the text made him slightly perplexed.

               “One consciousness transference by The Astral Project starts at $600 a day! Become an Astral Project host while your mind resides in an enjoyable state of Limbo! Great money for no work!”

               Well, thought Darwin, as he stuffed the ad into his pocket. Renting someone’s body is out of the question. I can’t afford that sort of price. I’m awfully tight on money. What if I rented out my own body? Oh, yes!  The idea was marvelous to Darwin, aside from the complication that he could think of no one on the planet who would wish to take on his body, or experience the world from his perspective. This minor complication upset Darwin, and he left for work.

Dickroy and Rodney were on the street to treat him as usual.

               “What’s that you have there?” Dickroy asked Rodney, early in the day.

               “Just a bucket of sewer water and refuse. Something I, oh, I don’t know, something I must dispose of.”

               “Oh?” said Dickroy, raising an eyebrow in a fiendish way. “And how might you—“

               But just then, Darwin was spotted walking along the sidewalk, head down, hurriedly making his way toward his work. His small coat was pulled over his small shoulders, his collar covering his small ears. He looked as though he was trying not to be seen.

               Dickroy smiled, and Rodney smiled back. The crowd of regulars stood alert and smiling, watching as the two mischievous men plotted their plots.

               “Darnon!” yelled Rodney, running toward the dwarf, with his bucket. “Darnon, I’ve got something for—oops!” Rodney tripped over nothing and threw the bucket of sewer water and refuse all over little Darwin, soaking him from chin to shin.

               “Oh my, I’m so sorry,” Rodney muttered.

               Like a primetime sitcom laughtrack, an uproarious hurricane of chuckles swirled through the street, twirling like tumultuous winds around Darwin’s head. Like lightning, the excited watchers barked their approval of the entertainment that revealed itself to them at the dwarf’s expense. The little man was drenched in filth, and he let out a gasp of sadness at his misfortune.

               “What’s that?” Rodney murmured. “You ain’t complaining, are ya?”

               “No,” Darwin said, keeping his head low, examining his fully soaked clothes. He liked to consider the people of the town his friends, and would never have dreamed of voicing disapproval. “It’s just…”

               “Just what?” Rodney kicked Darwin in the knee, and the little man gasped in pain, and fell to the ground, holding his joint.

               “Little thing all crumpled up in a ball, is he?” said Dickroy, as he made his way to the scene. There was a new girl at his arm, a trendy gal from the big city, like the one before. She expressed her disgust at the dwarf on the ground by putting her hand over her mouth and frowning a royal frown.

               “You gonna buy your girl some white cocoa powder donut balls?” Rodney said, to Dickroy. “She looks like she wants something like that.”

               The girl jumped up and down, and Dickroy replied, “Oh, you know it! Sure am. Just, the problem being, I don’t seem to have enough money on me.” And he pulled his pockets out to show just how empty they were. Besides the keys to a remarkable automobile and his small bag of gold coins, he seemed to have empty pockets.

               “Oh dear, your pockets are so empty. Think we should look to our little friend to fill them?”

               Dickroy smiled, nodded, and shook his new girl ‘til she nodded, too.

               Rodney picked Darwin up by the leg of his pants. “Got anything in there, little fella?” He shook the dwarf violently, whacked him in the back and on the sides a few times to rattle the change loose from his pants, and watched as item after item fell from the small thing.

               Dickroy picked up the two small gold pieces that fell from the dwarf, as well as a pencil and a piece of paper. “What have we here, little one?” He examined the piece of paper. “Oh!” He looked at Darwin, lying, now, on the ground, red in the face, wet in the eyes. “The Astral Project!? What’s that all about? You suppose you can get into someone else’s body?”

               “Lemme see that.” Rodney took the piece of paper, looked it over, and laughed. He turned to the crowd across the street. “The little thing thinks he can go transfer himself into someone else! Take on a new body and, Hell, probably thinks he can be someone new!”

               Like a classic joke from the third season of a well-loved sitcom, laughter burst forth with immediate intensity, unrelenting, growing only with tremendous and exaggerated waves. Each face spit rancor and shame at Darwin while he looked upon them, those he considered his friends just giving him a light ribbing. But a light ribbing it was not. A sinister, vile aspect was inherent to this laughter.

“No,” Darwin replied. “I want to rent my body to someone else, while I take a vacation.”

“A vacation!?” shouted Dickroy, as though he had heard nothing more ridiculous in all his life. “And you suppose someone on this planet would willingly pay money to spend time in your grotesque embodiment of miscreation?” The crowd laughed, as though they instantly saw how ludicrous an idea this was.

               As the laughter and general merriment of the crowd carried on, Rodney’s face lit up. He looked up from the piece of paper and pulled Dickroy aside. “A quick word!”

               The two stepped aside, out of hearing range of Darwin, who slowly sat up and brushed himself off. He looked to the ground, and only his pencil laid there. He put it back in his pocket.  He was going to be late for work, and hoped his friends  would return the Astral Project advertisement to him so he could be on his way. But as was once said already, he was a charming lad, and therefore he didn’t wish to interrupt.

               Smirks on their faces, Dickroy and Rodney moved closer to Darwin, towering above him like monolithic pillars. “Say, little thing,” blurted the mutton-chopped man, “you looking to take a vacation, and we looking to get a uh… new perspective.”

               “Yes. Yes,” interjected the man of high culture and even higher fashion. “We always look for new ways to expand our horizons! It is with great enthusiasm we must ask you to favor us above all others with passage to the inner sanctum of your body!”

               The dwarf didn’t know what to say. “Oh, but I suppose that would be OK!” crossed his mind. So did, “You gentlemen would not benefit from my inferior place!” “What might a lowly man as myself have to offer either of you as far as life experience goes? The two of you are so much worldlier and more accomplished than I.” His mind entertained many responses, but with the two human skyscrapers standing above him with unfaltering imposition, he was finally given to nod and say, “Certainly, certainly!”

               “And so it is!” exclaimed the man of mutton chopped face.

               “Let us go to the Astral Project,” exclaimed the fashionable man, grabbing Darwin by the top of the coat. Rodney chuckled  his airborne chuckle, and they made their way across town.

              

               “Hmmm. He certainly is a tiny one,” said a bespectacled man of moderate size, one Jondowat Josenheim, M.D. PhD., certified Astral Project specialist. He looked intently upon Darwin’s tiny frame, magnifying glasses for eyes, microscopes for monocles, examining his ups and downs, his ins and outs, and taking electromagnetic readings of his cerebellum. “And you’re fine with two people being projected into your body at once?”

               Darwin answered in the affirmative, nodding. “I just need the money.”

               “Gentlemen?” The doctor looked upon Mr. Airborne and Mr. Safari, requiring their input. “Each of you? Into this body? You really think…”

               “Yes, doctor,” replied the fashionable one. “You see, perspective of life is one of our passions. A passion we share, the two of us. And we thought there was no better way to learn of the perspective of lesser people than by voyaging into the personage of this little man before us.”

               The doctor was convinced. “Step this way, please.” He took Dickroy and Rodney into one room, and Darwin into another, where he hooked him to a large silver machine.

               “Tell me now, away from your friends. Are you sure this is what you want?”

               “I need an escape,” said Darwin. “I know they’re good fellows, they mean well, the couple of jokers. They just want to have a fun time without being held accountable. As long as they don’t get me into trouble I suppose it’s fine.”

               “You’ve been briefed on the conditions of the Limbo state into which you will enter, that is correct?”

               “It is.”

               “The minute fracture in Limbo’s delicate fabric, however… Has this been explained to you?”

               Darwin nodded, and waved his hand as though he was anciently familiar with such concepts as slight rips in the cosmic makeup of reality.

               “And though a leisurely vacation for the mind and soul it might be, it’s possible too, that before these fractures are repaired by our Astral Engineers, unpredicted things may arise from time spent there.”

               Again, Darwin nodded, as though it was not a problem. “I simply need the money.”

               Rodney “Clay” Airborne and Dickroy Safari were strapped to a machine of silver sides and metallic textures much like the one to which Darwin was attached. Each paid a sum of $300 to the Astral Project, a sum they’d accumulated over months of robbing Darwin on the sidewalk on his way to work, always passed off as loans he owed them to maintain friendship and good relations. He’d been happy to pay, unaware that he was indirectly paying for the astral projection to which he so looked forward, for the profit he hoped to gain.

               “…And first thing I’ll do, I think, is break my—our –little legs til the bone inside’s just powder,” Rodney grumbled over to Dickroy, while they each sat strapped to the machine. Dickroy could hardly contain his giddy laughter. “Then crawl on the ground and get shit on by the birds!”

               “Down by the great Hoar Tree! Yes! We must get shat upon, then eat a day’s worth of rat poison!”

               “Ooh! Ho ho ho! Yes, Dickroy! And put our hand on the railroad, have the train come knock off some  fingers!”

               “Imagine when the little runt gets his body back! Haha Hah! The shock and horror he’ll be in when he sees, rather, feels the decrepit state of his whole fleshy self. The body he has to live with forever!”

               The technicians who operated the silver machines for Rodney and Dickroy said nothing and thought nothing, for they were in no position, moral or professional or otherwise, to stop the two from behaving as they wished once inside the host, the man who rented out his body. Besides, they were technicians, doing the sort of job any unthinking person could do, and therefore didn’t necessarily have or require a high capacity for perception, nor the sort of personalities that would stand up and do the right thing when so obvious a treachery was underway. They hit all the right buttons and pulled all the right levers and turned all the right knobs, in just the right way, and to all the people of the Astral Project, this was good enough; their ability to operate machinery as trained monkeys was a sufficient quality that endeared them to the employers, and made them somehow valuable and deserving of bi-weekly pay. Such is the world.

               The specialist operating Darwin’s machine waved goodbye to the little man, and faded into dark, shadowy obscurity as Darwin’s vision turned to fog and dimness, as if pulled through a vortex to the realm where strangeness rests.

               Darwin felt the swift disembodiment of his consciousness, every glimmering of disquiet removed from his being. But the very concept of his being was now a cloudy specter in the distance.  The awareness of limbs, of hunger, of temperature dissolved away behind him, as though suddenly, for the first time in his life, he was free of the limitations of physical and emotional reality. Even his heart’s beat softened until he became aware of its total absence, and the involuntary action of breathing was supplanted by no need for oxygen or any substance of nature.

               Darwin resided now on an ethereal plane of existence,  or nonexistence, depending upon how one defined the act of existing. A sensation more profound than any combination of enlightenment and relaxation overcame him, and without vision as he knew it, he became acquainted with colors and shapes completely alien to human experience. In the total absence of all physical feeling, he felt, for the first time, free. It was as though the disentanglement of the self from the tiny husk of the body had moved him out of the world of stagnant normalcy and slavery to reality, into an undefined realm far beyond conceptualization.  

               This must be Limbo.

               The collected experience of Rodney “Clay” Airborne and Dickroy Safari were not quite as spectacular as that of Darwin. Instead finding themselves rid of the pesky human cage, they found themselves cramped into an even tinier one, a more claustrophobic consciousness. They were not suddenly free of the burden of physical manifestation, or of worry, or of pain, but rather thrown violently into a suffering that crippled them momentarily, as the body of Darwin was released from the silver machine.

               “How do you feel?” asked Dr. Josenheim. He examined the dwarf, now housing the consciousnesses of two men, trying to operate as one.

“I—we, we’re… ugh…” Darwin’s face became sweaty, his eyes watered, and he gripped his chest with a tiny hand. “We are fine.”

After a brief physical examination to ensure the transfer was a success, Rodney and Dickroy were free to leave the building, now as Darwin. They had one day to spend in the body as they saw fit. Unexpected to the two men, they found themselves not only in the body of Darwin the Dwarf, limited by its physical shortcomings, but also weighed down by every worry, insecurity, crushing feeling of sadness and defeat held by the dwarf’s figure. The maelstrom of misery that tumbled like blobs of chaos in the dark shadow of his heart snuck up on the two men, crippling them with sensations they had never known in all their lives. They were encapsulated in a nightmare.

Darwin’s place in the world, his emotional and mental state after years of torment and mistreatment, was now the basis of Rodney and Dickroy’s consciousness, and they found themselves unable to cope with such tremendous affliction. From their lives of plenty and stature and status, they had no concept of suffering, of pain, of being the butt of a lifelong joke, of being treated with disdain every day. They found themselves exposed, fragile skeletons of pine unequipped for the abuse of life, ready to break at the first strike.

With no strength or fortitude, the dwarf moved slowly along the street. He sat on a bench, and mourned itself.

This is Darwin? This is his existence?

As he swirled like a ghost in an ether of thought, in a psychic blue lagoon, Darwin’s perspective spiraled into forms impossible to a mind imprisoned by the physical. His life’s experience and knowledge sprawled before him, organized not by time or significance, but in an order conceivable only to Darwin.

               The passage of time was different in the Limbo state, an irrelevant consideration. Time and space and things associated with reality were of no consequence. So when Darwin became aware of the minute fractures and tears and ripples in Limbo’s delicate fabric, it was like observing a cosmic phenomenon. He could not worry, and he had no fear. He explored these fractures with interest.

               I want to go back, said Rodney. We can’t stay in this body. I want mine back.

               This is not what I expected. We must return. What have we done?

               Working together, the two tenants of the dwarf made the body return to the Astral Project. Its doors were closed for the night. Without realizing it, the dwarf had sat in despair at the bench the whole day. Beside the door the dwarf curled into a ball, and slept.

               He had no desire to return to his earthly form. With a taste of the timeless, a touch of the ethereal and cosmic, and his new experience with fractures within the chaos, Darwin was at peace. A new awareness opened inside of him, in the far recesses of his mind. By way of a mental fortitude strengthened through years of torment, Darwin’s inner life had become something vast and important. When freed of the chains of his body, he was unrestrained to grow beyond the bounds of human thought, and to develop into a being of transcendental worlds. He was everything, and this was made possible by first being nothing.

               As he flew back through the vortex, away from the realm of Limbo, Darwin felt the return of physicality, the chains of human form clasping to him. But the burden of inner turmoil and misery that had weighed him down for so long were nowhere to be found. They were gone. But Darwin’s tiny stature resumed, and he found himself attached to the silver machine.

               His vision cleared, and  Dr. Josenheim approached. “Darwin! Sir, how do  you feel?”

               Darwin laughed, and nodded his head. He felt new.

               “Sorry for the abruptness! There’s no way to alert one in Limbo that it’s time to return. Just kind of sneaks up on you! A little off-putting, considering the total absence of time. How was your stay? I hope the tiny fractures weren’t too dangerous.”

               Darwin assured the doctor all was fine. In the front office of the building, he was given $600 by the Astral Project receptionist, and wished a nice day. He went on his way out the door.

               “There he is!” shouted Rodney. And he and Dickroy hurried to Darwin, towering above him once more, their eyes heavy, their expressions not the usual smirks of self-satisfaction and amusement.

               Darwin’s heart typically jumped into a rapid beat when the two approached him or acknowledged him, each day. But now his heart rested, his demeanor was calm and collected. We was unafraid.

               “Darwin, ol’ boy,” started Dickroy. “We just wanted to come and say, from the bottom of our pitiful hearts, just how sorry we are.”

               “Yeah, pal. We had no idea. We had no clue. Your pain… what you’ve been through. It was all in  jest, you must know. We meant no harm. If we could only have seen inside…”

              The regular crowd had  by now gathered, but none were laughing. Men and women looked on, from across the street, awaiting a joke or a prank or a wallop to Darwin’s head. But the flustered, troubled voices of Rodney and Dickroy seemed to imply they would be waiting some time.

               “We didn't understand, Darwin! “ Dickroy knelt to his knees, his hands clasped in pleading. “Please know we could not imagine the trifles we caused you!”

               “It was too much for us to handle,” Rodney knelt to his knees, too. They were eye-to-eye with Darwin, whose face was unmoved by their confessions.

               “Let us know what we can do to make it up to you, ol’ pal. We only want for you to be happy, and to allow us to change how we’ve treated you.”

               Rodney nodded in agreement, and added, “It hurt us deep inside, like a pain we never knew. At no moment in my life have I felt like that. I didn’t…” His face became red, and he could not finish.

               The dwarf was quiet for a moment, and he looked into the eyes of his abusers. He seemed to be waiting.

               “Are you finished?” Darwin asked.

               The two nodded, and stood again like towers in the morning sun.

               Darwin stepped closer, and  spoke in a voice imbued with a power unlike any he had ever shown. It rumbled through the streets, and all who had by now fastened their attention to the spectacle were witnesses to a new Darwin.

               “What you have experienced,” said Darwin, “what you have explained to me, is called empathy. It is the ability of a living thing to place itself in the circumstances of another, and to understand another person or creature’s plight. It is to reflect on the pain or turmoil felt by that creature, and to remove oneself from one’s mind for a moment of objective observance, outside the self, outside the narrow vantage point of crude perspective. This is empathy, gentlemen, and it is a common trait among good people, people of worth, people deserving of the air they breathe, and the water they drink. It is a trait shared by anyone who has, for a moment, known injustice or cruelty. It is a thing which human beings have, and must not be taught. What you have told me is that before this experience, you lacked the capacity to empathize. You were people of filth, filled entirely with loathsome traits that bring you below the character of scum.”

               Dickroy looked at Rodney, and Rodney looked to the watching crowd. All eyes were wide, all mouths were shut, and only the sound of distant birds mocking the music of humanity could be heard.

               “I have been to the void,” Darwin continued. “I have explored the fractures within the chaos of Limbo, and I have returned as something more. I am more than what you see before you. You have seen the error of your ways. Both of you have felt the crushing horror of true misery. You have experienced the effects of your own cruel actions, and you have learned something. Some would say this is enough.

               “But this doesn't make you good. That you had to be taught such basic goodness through a technological procedure to force you into another perspective means you are hopeless creatures of no value. The empathy you know now is something you should have already had inside you, as a basic part of your essence. Without it you are vile and inhuman. You are incomplete beings, repugnant messes of inferiority. No lesson can fix this inherent flaw in your design. So you shall be ended.”

               The despondent gazes of Rodney and Dickroy turned to confused horror, and they took uneasy steps away from the dwarf. The mocking tones of birds in the distance remained the only sound of the scene.

               “I visited a plane of existence that rendered me whole,” explained the dwarf. “I have carried back everything I gained, and have returned to life as a god.”

               Quiet murmurs swept through the crowd, and hearts beat in unison as the dwarf straightened his once-crooked spine.

               Darwin’s hands turned to fists, his bones stiffened with rigid perfection, and his eyes became the vibrant,  glowing centers of galaxies.

               Rodney screamed in deafening howls as his body was overtaken with yellow flame. He collapsed to the sidewalk, rolling to no avail, his screams burning with his flesh. His body was unable to go into shock, as though a force held onto the mechanisms of his circulatory system, preventing him from dying, keeping the flames feeding. The pain of fire lasted long, as his life was prolonged via invisible hands.

               Dickroy’s flesh peeled as though unseen razors scraped his body at every angle, and his clothes were  tattered, splattered red. He, too, was soon on the ground, fighting invisible forces of torture and punishment. His blood covered  him within a minute, and discarded flesh piled up beside his struggling, crying, figure.

               “Their pain will not be brief,” Darwin announced to the horrified onlookers. “I will keep them among the living long enough for punishment to conquer them. And I will toy with them, I will give them brief moments of reprieve, only to send them back into this pain tenfold, ruined from out and within.”

              An explosion burst from Dickroy’s stomach, a fountain of red ascended from the  new opening. The sound of crunching bones exited his body, and he contorted into unnatural shapes, smearing his endless blood over the pavement.

               Rodney’s body stretched from arm to arm, leg to leg, still burning, still screaming, until each limb ripped from its socket, staining red the ground. And the fire went out.

               The invisible razors that struck Dickroy ceased to attack.

               The two crumpled messes of human defeat lied open and spilling, tattered, torn, burned, and beaten. Their cries carried to the stars.

               The crowd could not disperse. Each individual consciousness was the enslaved servant of the mob, mesmerized by the vision of madness on their town street.  A spectacle of the morbid, the unusual, the unexpected, it gripped them as an octopus’s tentacle, pulling them to the gaping maw of Darwin’s relentless return.

               “I turn off their nerves,” Darwin said, clapping his hands once. And the two mutilated men stopped screaming, just stared to the sky, unaware of the future, uncertain of their state.

               “They lie there without feeling, now. They can think, they can hear, they can see. But they cannot move, and they cannot speak.” Darwin raised his fists over his disproportionate head, addressing the crowd. “For just this moment, they think it is over.” He looked to the two near-death men beside him. “But it is not!” He clapped his hands once more, and a flock of vultures appeared, diving from the heavens, landing on Mr. Airborne and Mr. Safari, pecking at their bones and flesh.

               Darwin clapped again, and pain seethed through the men, their nerves re-activated. Their screams were nightmarish, but did not faze the birds who fed upon them. Entrails soon filled the birds’ beaks, and muscle ripped from bone was fought over by two or three birds at a time, stepping upon Rodney’s and Dickroy’s faces to gain leverage.

               The dwarf swung his arms in a pattern of chaos, and the birds dispersed, quickly vanishing from the town to find a fresh kill. Fire returned to Rodney, and the unseen razor blades returned to Dickroy. For some time the townspeople watched in hypnotic horror as carnage conquered their tiny community. Darwin let the fires and blades rage on for what seemed like an eternity, while time stood seemingly still, and while each person who gazed upon the conquest was forced to empathize with the vanquished lords whose blood stained the sidewalk.

               And when he felt there had been enough, Darwin let the two men die. The fire sizzled away on the final ashes of Rodney’s corpse, and the peeled flesh scattered around Dickroy’s bones like ten decks of cards on the floor of a saloon. The onlookers scattered, with sickness and shock their punishment. Darwin put his hands in his pockets and walked toward his tiny home. In the morning he would quit his job, and explore the full extent of his abilities as a new god.

              

The End.