The Fat Man

Drawn to this one saloon, I burst in upon an old, run­down and aban­doned bur­lesque house with its seat­ing arranged around the stage, like an indoor amphitheater.

“Hello,” I yelled out rather sheep­ishly. “Is any­one here?” Hav­ing received no response, I spun around to leave and turned right smack dab into the pock­marked face of this big olé fat man, all dressed in black, who seemed to have popped up out of nowhere.

“Who’re you?” I demanded to know, where­upon he pulled out a large butcher knife from behind his back and, with a smile, held it up to my face. Scared to death, I took off run­ning as fast as my legs could carry me. Round ‘n’ round the amphithe­ater I ran with this mad­man at my heels. For no mat­ter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shake ‘m.

As the amphithe­ater grew larger ‘n’ larger with each round I made, I found my self rac­ing around a struc­ture, the size of a foot­ball sta­dium, com­plete with those who’d come out to see such sport. And as the bur­geon­ing crowd chanted, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” over ‘n’ over, in a deaf­en­ing scream, I was over­come with the hope­less­ness of ever get­ting out of this place alive. Then I spot­ted a small slit in the wall of the amphithe­ater, through which I knew the Fat Man could never pass. Giv­ing my legs every­thing I pos­si­bly could, I began to out­dis­tance the Fat Man as I made tracks for this nar­row gate. Alas, not even I could fit through such a nar­row open­ing. Trapped, I turned to face the Fat Man, as the crowd whipped itself into a frenzy for blood, scream­ing louder and louder, “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Just then, I remem­bered the sword. Draw­ing it forth, I drew a gasp from the crowd, for just as I held it up with both hands, the Fat Man came crash­ing down upon it to his death. Hav­ing pierced ‘m through the heart, I let go of the sword in time to see the Fat Man slump to the ground with a butcher knife stuck in his chest. Stand­ing there, all drenched in blood, I screamed hys­ter­i­cally, as the crowd swooped down on me like an angry mob upon a mur­derer whose just been caught red-​​handed. Boy, was I ever relieved when they lit into the Fat Man instead. As they took back those parts of them­selves, which had kept the Fat Man alive, all these years, I watched ‘em tear the flesh off his car­cass, like birds of prey on a fresh kill, till there was noth­ing left but the gray shadow of a demon, the first of the three I’d coughed up.

There were many thoughts and feel­ings freed from the tyranny of the Fat Man, that day, far too many for me to recount. Cheer­ing wildly, they grabbed hold of me and threw me up over their heads as their lib­er­a­tor. After car­ry­ing me back and forth in front of the nar­row gate through which I tried to escape, they finally released me, but not before every one of them had come for­ward and embraced me. As I walked back through the nar­row gate of my own shadow, I watched them all dis­ap­pear into the great light at the other end of the tun­nel of vision, for I had just freed a very small part of human­ity from the demon known as Brute Force.