So yeah, the ending got rushed around eleven last night as I struggled to finish by midnight. Sorry!

Everyman

It was a dark and stormy night. The rain fell in torrents and ran off the streets like urine in the poorer districts. In the slums of the city the gutters were filled with a urine/rainwater mix that cleaned the streets, but not the children splashing around in it. Phallic bananas float down the gutters on a boat of putridity. It is through these streets that our hero (for he is a hero although he has not, till now, been given any sign of it) makes his way.

“Who?” You, the reader ask, “Is this hero? Is he a denizen of the slums, a kind philanthropist come to give aid, a constable, a thief? Who is this brave and worthy man?”

I tell you: He is the Everyman. He is all of those and more besides. He is the father grieving over a sick child, he is a thief, he is a soldier, he is a handyman, he is a writer, he is a brother, and he is a son. He is all of those and none. His name is Tom Jones, an utterly ordinary name for an utterly ordinary man. On this rainy night, through the torrents and thunder, he is making his way toward a little cottage that sits quaint and comfortable on the edge of the slums that are neither.

He opens the door, a small door, the wood peeling and cracking, remnants of paint still visible to one with good eyesight, which our hero has. Tom enters the room by means of the worn down door. It is a cozy room, almost enough to make him forget that it is raining aardvarks outside, the fire burns like hell, and an old woman tends it. There is a pot over it from which emanates the most delicious odors that someone like Tom could ever smell. Of course, Tom smells them every night, so they are not the most delicious odors in the world to him.

Oh, did I not mention? This is his home, the woman by the fire his mother, or so he thinks. So she has told him many a time, complaining about the hours it took her to give birth. But perhaps all is not as it seems in the home of Tom Jones. For does not the exterior of every man cover an inner interior that is much more complex?

The cottage is a comforting and reassuring refuge from the putrefying world outside. Tom takes his seat gratefully at the small, scarred table that sits in the center of the bright little room; his mother comes over to give him a glass of hearty ale. They talked for some time. He of his horrifying, despicable, boring job as a factory supervisor, she of her day taking care of their small home. Eventually she rose again, ostensibly to glance at the stew cooking on the fire. Tom continued to drink his ale, he noticed a sweetness to it. An engaging new taste he’d never tasted before.

And then he died. Horribly. The poison in his drink did what the wretchedness of his life could not. He died like every man, at the hands of the woman.

Window

There it was. It sat precariously on the toilet paper dispenser in the grocery bathroom. A window into another world. “Take $20 from my $100 withdrawal for Ryan’s cable bill.” That was all. Just a note, a reminder. A slip of paper absentmindedly forgotten in the haste to wash one’s hands. The handwriting is spidery, shaky, like holding a pen is almost too fatiguing to the muscles. Its author learned to write in a time when writing well was an accomplishment. It is cursive, each letter perfectly formed. The tips of the t’s just barely brush the top of the line above them. The curve of one letter into another never falls beneath the bottom line.

This is that woman’s life. And this is Ryan’s life. What was she doing with that slip of paper in a grocery store? Who is Ryan? Why is she paying his cable bill? How is he getting cable for only $20 a month? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. But somewhere out there is a woman, to whom these answers make up the details that compose her life.

Confusion

“Can you see anything?” The Face on the Bottom questioned the Face on the Top.

“Indeed, I can,” the Face on the Top replied. “I see beings, like the ones that made us, but uglier, staring at us.”

“Staring at us?” The Face in the Middle queried. “Why?”

“I do not concern myself with the why and wherefores of lesser beings!” the Face on Top snapped with an ugly twist of his fearsome beak. “They do seem particularly interested in my visage, however. My only concern is that they display proper homage.”

The Face in the Middle scoffed, “You have become vain in your old age. They don‘t respect us. Look at the way they point!”

The Face at the Bottom shivered, “I don’t like this. It is not right. Fly at them and scare them away. Their behavior is not worthy of us.”

There is no movement. None of the shivering fear that means one of their trio has departed.

The Face at the Top cries, “I cannot move! What evil is this? Why do my wings not flap?”

The Face on the Bottom whimpers.

The Face in the Middle growls, “I told you. They don’t respect us. No one pays homage. No one sacrifices. We are merely a curiosity. Fallen gods.”