Small Red

The tiny man was all dressed in red velvet. He became larger and smaller, by turns. The room he was in happened to have been a large fruit but was now filled with deadly light. If he smiled, children died. “The laughing aircraft have retarded your omnipotent sport,” he said, contemplatively digging in his breastcoat pocket. When he finished it was clear that he had not been retrieving something; quite the opposite: the pocket had consumed arbitrary portions of his hand, and where the flesh was torn away the horrifying remnants were clean and dry. I realized then that the man wasn’t even there. It was the pocket. It had been the pocket all along. The man had a terrifying mockery of a smile on his face as he intoned the last words I ever heard: “Bones dancing to a dream whose hook caught your disease’s root; like moths exploding from invisible radiations of some deadly mote.”