Little Man — Matthew Mitchell

The little man was dead. Of that, both boys were certain. Some time passed before they came to this assumption, but the conclusion was unanimous. For one thing, the little man hadn't moved since they first came upon it in the forest. Not even after they crept up beside it and shouted. For another, blackish blood had pooled beneath the little man's body. Thin rivulets eked out across the stone on which it lay.

"What is it?" Alex asked.

"Heck if I know," Cade replied.

 "A little man," Alex said.

The corpse was indeed quite small. Were it to stand, its bald head would barely clear either of the boy's knees. Alex was a year older than Cade but they were of a similar height. To call the dead thing a "man," however, was up for debate. Unlike their shared stature, the boy's opinions were often each their own.

"A monster," Cade decided.

"The smallest man ever."

"You're crazy."

Its skin was bright and porous like an orange peel. It had more legs and arms than should have been allowed by its maker. The toes and fingers, too, were odd-numbered, had the boys thought to count them. It had a face with lidless eyes and lipless teeth but no nostrils could be identified.

"How did he die?" Alex asked. The little man had a penis, he'd noticed. The member was loose, and clung to two of its legs.

Cade had also seen the thing's genitalia but it mattered little to him. There was a wrinkled quality to its flesh that reminded the younger boy of his Great Ninny lying in her open casket. It had no hair, and baldness was for old men. "Done got old," he determined.  

"What about the blood?" Alex pointed.

"What about it?" Cade frowned.

"It's all come out. See?"

Cade pondered this. "Got to go somewheres, don't it? I 'spect it comes outta everybody when they're dead."

Alex liked the way Cade talked. There were a lot of things to love about the boy and his speech pattern was high on the list. Sometimes he tried to talk like his friend, but his parents chided the imitations. They told him it wasn't good to speak that way; that proper language was important for a growing boy. He wasn't sure why it mattered. 

"Bet it got bit," Alex said. "A vampire, I will tell you what." 

"Vampires ain't real," Cade replied. "A'sides that, they drink of the blood 'til you ain't got no more." He shook his head. "The heck they teach you'ns at that church-school?"

If you forced him to be honest, and he usually wasn't, Cade would admit that he thought little of Alex. The older boy rarely entered his consciousness outside of their quick romps through the woods, if ever at all. He vaguely considered the older boy to be a strange sort; didn't particularly care for the soapy sheen of his hair or the clumsiness with which he carried himself. His folks referred to Alex as that little pervert on the rare occasions he'd had him over. Cade didn't know what that word meant but knew better than to ask.

"Maybe it fell," Alex said, "like an angel or something." He tilted a hand over his thick glasses and peered at the heavens. 

"Unlikely." Cade pushed air through his teeth. "But I reckon we can find out." He looked about the forest floor until his eyes landed on a sturdy stick. He reached for the branch and hauled it through the grass. "Yessir," he said, and scooched closer to the body.

"What're you doing?" Alex backed away. "Don't touch it," he said.

"Ain't gonna," Cade shot him a look. "That's what the stick is for." He shook it at the older boy.

Alex grew nervous as he watched him wedge the stick beneath the little man's body. He worried it might spring to life, having played dead like a possum. It could lash out at them with those long fingers. 

"We'll have this figured, tell you what," Cade said. He pressed down on the stick and grunted. The body was heavier than he expected. The branch cracked in two under its weight. Cade tried again. With shorter, studier leverage, the corpse eventually flipped over on its face with a wet smack.

Exposed, the little man bore a six-inch tear down the length of its back. A pinkish loop of intestine had slithered out the gash. Blueish spine-bones glimmered within like a baby's teeth.

Alex heaved. His mouth filled up with drool and his skin turned the color of ash. 

Cade leaned away from him. "Easy, now."

He gagged again, strained against it, and a vein popped open in one eye. Tears of resistance dribbled down Alex's cheek and blood spread like ink below the surface of the sclera. He swallowed a burp.

"Aw, heck," Cade said. "Don't go gushing on my toes." He drew back his sandals and held out the stick like a shield.

Alex laughed and tried to hold back another belch. Spittle spritzed through his teeth and dazzled like opal dust against the falling sun. "Sorry," he managed.

"Reckon you might be right," Cade said. He poked at the innards, rolled the branch across the flap of flesh along its back. 

"So it is a man."

"What?" Cade kept prodding. "Heck no. Ain't no human bein', I can tell you that."

"Oh."

"But I do believe she may have come out of the sky."

"What do you mean she? Didn't you see? He's got a ding-dang." Alex crouched beside his friend. "Flip him back over, I'll show–"

"Naw," Cade rose and dropped his stick. "Don't believe I will."

"Okay," Alex retrieved the branch. "Well, I seen it."

"Uh-huh," the younger boy dusted his second-hand jeans. He looked off, deeper into the forest. Wanted to be anywhere else. "Gonna have a look around."

"Look for what?"

"Just around," Cade strayed off from the corpse. Away from the other boy. "Havin’ a look, is all."

"For clues, you mean? To solve the mystery of the littlest man ever?" 

"Sure."

Alex flashed Cade his widest grin. "Righty-oh, good buddy."

Once his friend had wandered off into the trees, the older boy’s smile faded and he began to think. His mind fell again to the little man’s penis, as it had, off and on, since he first noted its presence. Should he take another look? He was easily spooked; did not typically favor any time spent alone. But Alex had learned that some of his favorite activities required solitude. He brandished the stick, and sweat formed at the edges of his greasy hair.

Cade had not gotten far before he recalled his missing branch and returned to retrieve it. His sandals padded softly on moss and decomposing leaves. 

Alex hadn’t heard his approach. 

Cade thought to call out to him but stopped short. From a slight rise, just behind a tree, he watched the older boy work the branch down the shaft of the dead thing’s penis. "Yeah," he heard Alex groan, "stand you up straight like a big man."

The white eyes of the corpse bored into Cade. It seemed to beg mercy, pleaded to be saved from further indecencies. Blood slithered forth from between the stick and the expanded meatus of its urethra. 

Alex held the dead, tent-poled penis between his finger and thumb. "That's better," he said.

A cold sensation gripped Cade by the jaw. The desire to remain unseen felt like the most important thing in the whole world. He backed away slowly and slipped into the folds of the forest. 

Spurred by vacant terror, the younger boy hurried along for nearly a quarter mile without looking back. He tried to shake the image of what he'd seen Alex doing but it lingered like the stench of something rotten. A synesthetic bridge in his thoughts which linked the depravity to a forgotten Easter egg he cracked open one July. Cade could smell his own discomfort.

"Gosh-dang pervert," he muttered.

By the dimness of the sky, Cade knew it was time to head for home. To arrive past dark was not uncommon, but there would be consequences. For one, dinner would not wait for him and the memory of his sparse breakfast had faded. But on the other hand, his fear of the switch had long since died. Though hunger and pain were no strangers to the boy, his belly turned at the thought of the former.

As he changed course, Cade stumbled over a shallow ditch: A twenty-foot rut in the dirt, he discovered, that zig-zagged through the trees. Despite his growling stomach, Cade decided to have a look. He disregarded the phantom pains across his backside as his folks screamed in both ears like the echoes of a conch.

 At the far end of the plough-line, Cade came upon a shattered mass and squatted beside it. He pondered the tangle of dirt. Judging by what remained, a small cylinder had clashed with the upturned soil. It was translucent, purple, and looked much like a tube of glass. The front-facing half had broken open and a smear of red marked the jagged hole.

Without his stick, Cade prodded at the crystalline wreckage with his sandal sole. For a moment, the substance wobbled, gelatinous, under the pressure of his foot. So like the mixture of starch and water his Great Ninny had shown him how to make, it hardened and cracked. A shard punctured the soft rubber heel and lodged in his flesh.

"Hell-fire," the boy shouted.

He bent to pluck the splinter from his foot. A furtive movement above drew Cade's attention away from his pain. In those expansive nanoseconds, which are only allotted in moments of true strangeness, a bird, he thought. But if'n a bird, why the coldness at my back on this warm summer eve?

He turned his head.

A purple tube, intact and gleaming, hovered along the boughs of a birch above; clear as violet cellophane, just like the cylinder at his feet. Within the airborne chamber, he could see the thing scrabbling around inside. It seemed to shout down at him but he couldn't hear over the dull rumble of the craft. A sputtering sound like a deep-seated fart. 

That ol' boy was right, Cade thought. Fell from the sky.

He watched the craft ascend higher, then turned to follow the trajectory from which he had trekked. Back to where its brethren lay broken and defiled. Towards Alex.

To see the thing alive and naked, with legs and arms aplenty, the boy decided he had been right too.

A goddang monster.

***

When Alex had finished with his activity, a sound like thunder cracked the stillness of twilight. He hoped Cade would return before the rain started to fall; wished to show the younger boy what he had done to the little man. Surely his friend would be impressed by the excavation and restructuring of the corpse' penis. Maybe Cade would forget how squeamish he had initially been.

Alex thought back to the first time they had met. It was the second day of vacation bible school in August of last year. The younger boy had simply walked into the cafeteria and plopped into a seat beside him at lunch. There was a heaping pile of deserts on his paper plate. No proteins or veggies.

“Best get you boys some cake,” Cade had said and began to eat. He wore a tank top and bore a remarkable amount of muscle for a kid so close to his age. He hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself. “Good shit.”

The sparse group of children who chose to sit in Alex’s vicinity took to the new boy at once. They began to engage him as if he’d always been there. Alex was impressed and had remained so in the ten odd months since that day.

The sound of thunder swelled above.
Cade is my best bud, he thought.

AUTHOR BIO:

Matthew Mitchell is a horror fiction and comic book writer from the Ozarks. His short stories can be found in the Black Metal Horror anthologies from Castaigne Publishing. He is the co-creator of the Horrorium comics anthology.