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.