MicroHorror

One day… You, just as with most people at some point during their lives, shall have the obscene misfortune of walking through the waiting room doors of your local hospital, expecting to retrieve a cherished loved one after their appendectomy, to find a thirty-pound rat feasting on a tipped over pail of bio-waste. He will look up at you with welcoming eyes, lick his green and black greased lips and say through jagged tartaric teeth, “Come on, friend, join in on the free food. Things always taste better when they’re free.” Then turn to a sack of liposuction fat, stick in a straw, suck heavily, and nod at you vigorously with a most contented look upon his face.

His tiny, cranberry-like eyes gazed in wonderment at the single droplet of blood perched precariously on the tip of his bowie knife.

“Do you see that?” He switched his line of sight briefly to the girl.

“Mmmmmmrgh… mmmmrrrrrgh!!” she responded from beneath the eloquently placed duct tape.

“It’s like a metaphor for life, don’t you think? You see, the droplet rests at the apex of its existence. At any moment it will inevitably move from its finely balanced position and either roll down the hilt of the knife and continue on, joining with the knife in its dynamic activities or it will roll off the tip of the blade completely and fall into the dirt below thus ending its existence forever. You see?”

“MMMRRRGH!!!” she replied with apparent distaste.

“Please. Please, allow me.” He spoke through his yellowed and withering lips, spittle crossing the short distance between their faces and landing on her waxy pale cheeks. He tore the tape from her face in one quick motion.

“You sick, sick, sick mother fucker. Do you torture ALL of your victims with unending hours of prose and hack philosophy before you do away with them? Or is there something you think you see in me which gives you the impression that I actually give a rat’s ass what you say? Fuck! Get it over with already before I throw myself down on your blade just to end my misery.”

Johnny cracked a tooth the other day. A wisdom tooth. He had been cleaning out the wood chipper and couldn’t resist the urge to go in for a little taste of sticky red goo. The tooth should have been removed years ago but he’d wanted to get through college with them all intact. Deep down he dreamed of one day retiring to a position high atop a mountain where many a monk would revere his words.

So of course he went down to the local barbershop posthaste to have it attended to.

“Good mornin’.”

“How do, young man? What’ll it be?”

“I have this tooth, you see…” And Johnny explained the situation to the barber.

“This is a barbershop son. You have to get a hair cut.”

“I see. Good up sale. Good up sale. All right, then. I’ll have a haircut and a tooth removed. Why not throw in a bloodletting, too? I’ve never had one of those. What do you do? Just lay out the leeches on my arms or something? Hey, I don’t need to get naked, do I?”

“I only do haircuts, boy.” The barber walked to the door and held it open. “You have to go to a dentist. And then a psychiatrist. Good day.”

Nostrils flared. Forehead furrowed. Johnny got stressed.

“You don’t have to get condescending.”

Johnny grabbed the barber by his marshmallowy face and pushed it half way through the plate glass door, slicing both ears clean off. His bifocals fell to the ground and smashed to pieces.

“What the hell do you have the barber pole for? Do you even know what the stripes mean?”

“Khoogh ghok?” Barber replied with blood, sweat, and tears streaming down his face.

“Oh, this is just freakin’ useless. You’re a real piece of work, you know that? I ought to call the BBB on you.” Johnny felt a sudden twang of guilt. “Sorry about your glasses.”

Outside, Johnny decided he could no longer handle the pain and took a seat at the café. He reached into his own mouth and from the spot where the tooth should have been he pulled out a hard jagged piece of charcoal. He sniffed it–hickory–and then recalled having had his wisdom pulled out just last week. He laughed at the foolishness of it and flipped the nasty wet charcoal into a police officer’s coffee cup.