The ringleader offered him a dollar if he would stay for the show, so the young desperado did. He was fingering the smooth-bore barrel of his revolver as a few militias bustled around a few shop ramadas—a handful of dirty-faced children roamed afront of the wagon carts reared before the town hall, their caretakers staggered behind, and a rise of murmurs washed the air with heavy faces of anticipation and aggression. The kid audience stood from a large firepit raked with shiny stones and glinting wood. His red coat grew a dark brown with the nightly backdrop, and he produced a small flame atop his fingers and flicked it into a starved flame. The children recoiled, only for them to grow closer to the orange glow. Flimsy nightshade and faded lantana ornamented the carts, and atop those carts peered with white-beaded eyes a band of an immigrant family, an androgynous pantomime, and a veiled cage. The mime was the first to clamber downwards as he twisted along the rod of his spine into a contorted hourglass fitted into a denim corset; the creature flung its leg and knee over the shoulder and rude pops of bones crackled as loud as the fire. The darkness had shrouded his frame—with the fiery shade his face was chalked with deep white dyes and his sockets were inked with black. Its physiognomy made the spectacle an anthropomorphic rat with its bulbous snout accented with the contrast of the dye and its eyes yellowed from the fire. The amorphous family, still in the dark, plucked their ancient strings and rapped their metal pans for an alien discordance that propagated all and every form of discomfort. The pantomime churned in its garbs of patchwork from ladies’ dresses and men’s denim to the unearthly tune, and it slowed the intensity of its elucidations toward the stars as it inched away from the fire back into the recess of the wagons, returning to darkness. The rasp and twangs of the family paused, and their silhouettes sank away with their sound.
The militias looked on, caught in this stupor of pettifogging showmanship of what the horrors of the world should really be. Just as the sharpshooter was aiming to walk off, a man of dense muscle and small rags squeezed from the wagons, birthed in the devilish ritual of inhuman music and sinister dance. His height pushed his face just out of the light of the fire, however, his grotesque muscles and savage cuts that laced his body were plainly visible to the audience. The behemoth materialized a bison horn browned with dried blood and feces; blowing into it, a low bellow pervaded the ground, and all other natural noises hushed. The cage’s silhouette grew thinner, but the contents of the bars were still obscured. The strong man bellowed, again, and the cage was rattled at its base with feral groans emanating from the hidden carryon. The bison horn fell to the floor as an emaciated human lunged from the wagon crevice onto the tattered man—the perverse creature locked its ankles across the man’s back as it shrieked animal yelps and cries that forced the kids back in sharp terror; the militias ran to shield the children and were left to observe the rest of the show as their spawn cowered.
The barbarian latched thick hands underneath the creature’s underarms and unclasped him from his body and slammed the man onto the ground with a dull thud. Maybe concussed, the creature cradled its head to bate the pain only for the strong man to charge the heel of his dark foot into its ribs—three, gnashing crunches jumped from the animal. Gusts of sand were thrown up and the effluvium of blood, feces, and gunpowder compelled the attention of every soul to its source; the fiend was gasping for breath as it rubbed its hands along his exposed ribs, and he floundered with frantic waves of his arms as he would claw himself backward with one hand as the other would try to bat away the strong man. In a swoop, the fiend was wrapped up in the strong man’s wrist and in a raise of the man’s arm, he crashed the fiend into the fire. The closing sound of the night was the creature’s guttural howls, screams that bite at sanity and restore faith in man’s cruelty—the strong man placed his pillar of leg muscle onto the creature’s ankle, and its flesh seared, and hair singed, and skin stripped.
The desperado’s heart pulsated in both terror and thrall of never having seen such violence before. The barbarian looked coldly into the fire, then the corpse, then into the throng of his witnesses. In his battle stance, his face was just barely visible—an expressionless glare, a stare of fixation and dark determination; he peered too long at the armed men, for they all had their guns unholstered, and all already with their fingers just one centimeter from releasing—a string of bullets fired the monster down.
The ringleader was aside the sharpshooter as his main attraction was riddled with lead, and the short man clutched the sides of his scalp with his bony fingers in a burrowing stare of exasperation at the loss of his greatest profit. Peering back at the militia, the men glowed a bloodless pale in the radiance of the fire—a cacophony of gun metal hitting leather holster bottom thawed the spell of mindless violence. All spawn bore faces of wonder, some rappelled into deeper thrall as the volley of bullets had whizzed past their kid flesh into the behemoth of the man whom they have thought indestructible. Shopkeepers and deputies fell out of their homicidal stupors, and the crowd was immediately dispersed and filed into their lodgings; beside the sharpshooter, the ringleader staggered for a few moments to observe the pulse of his slain warrior. His short legs plunked up to the fallen’s carved features; collapsing to his shoddy knees, the show master tried the man’s arm, he padded his groomed fingers across the skillet-sized palm, and the humble creature only retracted its flesh from the hold of its master. Now, the ringleader cups the fat of his grisly cheek, and he lays the warmth of his own cheek on his cold, and now the devil could not let out a faint cry of not simple loss of profit, yet a wail for the pride of the spectacle that had prophesized man’s evils.
What’s you thinks gona happen now?
Huh?
Them kids. They saws all that—the wallopin, the burnin, the massacrin. You thinks they liked it?
The young desperado looked on towards the ringleader that was both questioning him and craning his neck to address some higher faith, as he was laboring to thump the barbarian’s arms across his chest as though he were to be buried.
I saw’s you—oh, I saw’s you. ‘Stead of you’s pulling out ye gun like them rest, you reels back and watches my man get torn. Looks at this. Look.
He tugged forward the corpse’s chin, and his neck fat gleamed as white as gristle and oil-black splatters spurted from his throat as, still, the man’s eyes were left open, glassed globes with shredded irises and corneas full of black holes. His nose had been replaced with a divot, pooling into a soup of warm cartilage and pressed bone. Thin stripped flesh flapped the shorn pulp of his ear to his cranium and rounded desert grains form ancient filigree of ground inked with evil blood and framed with inhuman skin.
Moon-toned drab looked grey as black scarlet oozed over and over—all wholly indistinguishable from pig blood and meat. The ringleader was to reach for the strong man’s strewn garbs when a young deputy let off a warning shot and warned the two to leave, lest they want the same death as the one before them.
