The last thing
Stevie remembered hearing was the creak on the floor. It was an unusual
creak. Not that creaks are unusual, per se, but this creak was because
Stevie lived alone. Unless you considered his cat Norman a roommate,
which technically he was, but cats don't make the floor creak.
So Stevie heard
the creak and rolled to his back. The last thing Stevie remembered seeing
was a large fist connected to the right arm of a very large, bald headed man
with no neck. This particular fist connected with Stevie's jaw and turned
everything black.
When Stevie woke
up, he was hog tied in a small rowboat near the center of Lake Michigan.
Because he was lying on his stomach, Stevie could only see out of one
eye. And that one eye again viewed the large, bald headed man with no
neck. "Oi, awake are we", said the bald man. "I'm glad to
see that, as I hate to kill someone who is already dead." The man
paused for a moment, as if to consider his last words. But then continued.
"The way I see it," he said, "you are on the short end of the
stick right now and don't really have much for options.
Agreed?" Stevie would have agreed, being the agreeable type, but the
handkerchief gag that was tied across his mouth made speech pretty much
impossible. "No comment, huh? That's too bad. I like to
have a little dialogue before I kill someone. It makes the evening a
little more enjoyable. But no matter, we can make this a monologue just
as well. Friedrich Nietzsche talked about the superman and Adolph Hitler
took his ideas and tried to put them into practice. The weak and less
useful of society were disposed of to make room for the new race of supermen
that would rise up from the German people.* At least that was Hitler's
plan. It worked for a while, but then things went wrong." The
man paused as if waiting for some comment. Seeing that Stevie continued
as indisposed, the man continued. "See, Hitler was cleansing the
race, getting rid of the riff raff. If makes perfect sense. Except
then he made the mistake of genocide. Wiping out an entire race, simply
because they were Jewish. That was his mistake. He lost some of the
strongest minds and hardest workers. Which brings us to you."
At this point the man stopped rowing and sighed. They had made it to the
middle of the lake by this point and the night was perfectly still. He
set the oars into the boat and rolled Stevie onto his back. Slapping Stevie
across the face, he continued. "Now listen up, you. You are
like the first part of Hitler's plan. No good, worthless and
disposable. You owe Mr. Vermicelli a lot of money and he is tired of
waiting. So now it's my job to take you swimming." The man
poked Stevie in the eye with one of his sausage like fingers.
"That's for being so fat and making you almost too heavy to
carry." Stevie would have explained his desk job and lack of
exercise, but again, his gag got in the way.
The man sat Stevie
up and looked him in the eye. "At this point, you are screwed.
Even if you could talk, there is nothing you could say. So thanks for
listening, sorry the water is so cold." And with that the man rolled
Stevie into the lake, nearly silently and then proceeded to row back
to shore.
(*Author’s note- I do not agree with the large, bald man’s
opinion. Everything Hitler did in regards
to human life was wrong and immoral.)