Sleepy Village
It was a sleepy village; an incomplete, very small village. Plans to finish parts of it were never come to pass. Houses were built but not all of the houses. Tall and thick the grasses grew instead of the concrete edifices. It seemed to compensate for the lack of numbers, those that were actually built are big, mammoth abodes and there were only six of them.
The village wasn't enclosed in any form of barrier. The walls that should have protected it from the outside world were never made. Only the sad looking gates at the entrance to the village were constructed. It didn't really keep out the strange men travelling from other lands. It was for these reasons that each of the houses had been visited by intruders countless times, the valuable contents claimed by these nefarious people.
Burglaries had become so rampant but the forces of the law were unable to do anything to apprehend anyone. Suspects were known but not caught. Never caught.
It was because the law that existed in the land needed more. The burden of proof weighed the victim and freed the criminal.
The criminals were allowed to steal and to kill, allowed to kill and to steal while the victims must let them. After all the law and its forces are useless, the villagers knew.
Everyone started buying arms. They learned to pull the trigger. Not out of want but of need. Fear drives the most coward of men to be brave.
And one unholy night, a shot was heard but at the same time nobody heard it.
A body, almost lifeless, lay on somebody's kitchen floor, gasping for the much needed breath but air would only escape out in frothy, reddish bubbles as his punctured lung expand. He was the intruder and now his chest had been ripped open by a tiny bullet and his fizzing blood was already gushing out and drenching his camouflage—his black shirt.
The nameless face, wreathed with pain, begged for help, any help from the six respectable people surrounding him, one of whom he was positive shot him.
Finally, five of those respectable persons came closer to the nameless entity and sitting on their heels, each of them took an appendage including the head to support. The five men were seemingly going to help carry the injured.
While the sixth one, the kindness one; the one that still wore his white coat from work of curing the sick, smiled. "I'll help you make your life worthwhile," he said comfortingly and with that he plunged a scalpel blade number 11 into the nameless one's eye socket. The sharp tip of the knife cut into the intruder's eye and severed the organ's muscular attachments. And soon the kind doctor was able to scoop out the eye in toto with blood dripping onto the floor.
Amidst the horrendous shout of pain, the doctor could be heard saying, "All I need is the cornea. I think I did a good enough job harvesting it." The doctor again smiled as he raised the eyeball, the white orb with the dark centre and dangling with it is a piece of whitish strand of cut nerve.
The doctor seemed to be showing off his trophy to the now sightless man. "Your type of people only needs the money but you take more. Much more that money could not in any amount buy." The smile disappeared on the kindly face as he continued, "Did I say that I only need the cornea? That's just a tiny part of your eye….so you could say I too have taken more than was necessary."
"Good God, he's still alive. That must hurt like hell," guffawed one of the doctor's companion, the one that does fieldworks and constructions. After all he had felt the intruder's fight on his restraining hold weaken but it did not disappear.
"As you said God is indeed good and this man deserves hell." The doctor suddenly smirked as he continued, "And he won't be alive after I do this." And with that the doctor's gloved hand made a larger horizontal incision from one side of the nameless man's abdomen to the opposite side. With the gaping, oozing wound, the good doctor was then able to insert his hand inside the dead man's gut and cut and feel his way to the diaphragm. Navigating his way up the man's chest cavity underneath the ribs, the doctor hooked his finger and grabbed the man's heart. Pulling the reddish, once beating organ none too gently out, he then asked for a clean basin.
"One new basin coming right up," the house owner said. He was the one who shot the carcass lying on the kitchen floor but the blood on his shirt didn't belong to the dead human but to the pigs he had to slaughter for a living.
The basin, disinfected with sodium hypochlorite and rinsed with copious water after, was placed gently on the floor. And soon the man's heart was followed by his fresh, dripping liver. The blood pooled on the basin as soon as the dark-reddish, spongy organ was laid there. The meat vendor stared, amazed. The human's insides really looked like that of a pig; testimony that humans are animals. The meat vendor spat on his own floor in disgust. No wonder humans could act like animals. The intruder in his house was an animal. He deserved to be butchered just like the pig that he was.
There were six of them, each own their own home in the village. The doctor, the meat vendor, the engineer, the farmer, the dentist and the gossip monger. The intruder's eyeballs had already been safe kept in a separate container, suspended in some liquid chemical. They were like two balls swirling round and round in a sea of transparent liquid; two eyeballs that appeared like they were observing everyone, the six people inside the room in particular.
The five people that had restrained the corpse way back when it still breathed life and was able to squirm strongly against them while his body parts were being harvested, chorused, "You have done great, doc. The organs will do good being transferred to someone whose life is worth more."
The carcass' existence obviously was of no consequence to them. The life of the intruder was just a throw-away; the kind of life that serves no purpose in a society, worse it is a cancer in the society.
Cancers could metastasize and once it spreads, it kills. All cancer cells must then be killed because one remaining is just as dangerous as many... One intruder at a time rids the society of one small but significant cancer cell.
"But what to do with the rest?" the gossip monger queried. He liked to ask questions and even the littlest details should be known to him.
"We need a pail," the engineer rasped commandingly.
"A pail?"
"Yeah. Construction for my new housing project will begin in a few days. The collected blood will then be a good offering for whatever land spirit that reside in the area. It does beat chicken's blood anytime. The soil will be soaked with that bastard's lifeblood and be blessed. The houses I'm about to help build will be strong and sturdy, thanks to that shit."
"No need to swear," the other doctor in the room, mumbled.
"We're all thinking that this guy is thrash, right, so I'll swear as many time as I want," the engineer sneered.
"Kids have a habit of biting my finger. You won't ever hear me swear though. I still pull their teeth as painless as possible," the do-gooder explained.
"You said it—kids— the four-to-five year old variety. They really have no idea what they're doing but the shit in front of us did. So hence fort from now to eternity let's call him, shit. He threw away whatever regard he's due when he threw away his regard for others."
"Maybe he's poor that's why he did it," the gossip monger suggested, already ready to make up a sob, sob story.
"The bible teaches the virtues of poverty. It's like a lame way of comforting people that being poor is okay but reality is being poor is not okay. Being a thief because you're poor though is not the only way. This shit was just fucking lazy. And if he wasn't caught today by us, he would continue with his kind of job until one day he would kill his next victim. People go up the ladder of success. Thieving after all is just the lowest step for these kinds of people, it goes up to murder."
"I—we just made sure we did it first to him and not him to us. A self-defense," the meat vendor added.
"Yeah."
Everyone then smiled. Everyone shared a sense of accomplishment of ridding themselves a nuisance.
"Now, with this pail, we could save some of that red goo," the engineer drawled after receiving the container from the owner of the house.
"We still have a body," someone raised the obvious, the big lump of meat in front of them all.
"I'll have his flesh. It'll be a good fertilizer," the farmer offered.
The rest sighed with relief.
"For a moment there, I though I'll be selling human meat," the butcher joked.
"Asshole, don't suggest stupid things. Just allow us to borrow your big knives so we could separate the meat from the bones," the engineer snapped.
The meat vendor just ignored his foul tempered comrade. ehe chops He chops the dead for a living and what a good stress reliever it is. A foul tempered comrade doesn't get him riled up. The intruder does. "I already have these cleavers. Let me hack the meat off. I got the most experience here." The meat vendor slash butcher filed his two cleavers together then slashed away. The flesh clung to the bone tenaciously but they were still no match to skill. The muscles in the calves and legs came off in sheaths like debarking a tree. The muscles and fats of the stomach were taken off as slabs of meat that appeared juicy red with thick whitish border. The tough skin did resist the body being torn apart but it was still flimsy protection against the will of the one who wield the knife.
Tattered and grounded flesh flew. Also pieces of crushed bones were catapulted together with the splatter of blood. These tiny fragmented projectiles with its red sauce landed everywhere on the walls, on the floors and on the bystanders.
It was a literal blood bath.
"Yuck dude," the gossip monger tried to cover himself futilely with his hands.
"Do you have a meat grinder? The smaller the particle, the faster it will decompose, the faster we could use it as a fertilizer," the farmer suggested.
"Yup, I have it," answered the homeowner, the meat slasher, the same dirty man squatting on the floor.
"You know…I won't be buying your produce from now on," the gossip monger told the farmer.
The farmer just shrugged.
"How about the bones?" the doctor asked, recognizing that disposing the bones is always a problem even in the medical school that he had attended before.
"Don't worry 'bout the teeth. I could pull it out then sell it. There's a market for those kinds of things."
"I wasn't asking 'bout the teeth. The bones. What are we going to do to the bones?"
"Grind it too," answered the engineer.
"Grind? With what?"
"The one we use to grind stone with. That one. I got that at work. Don't sweat it. The powdered bone will make a good filler in the cement instead of sand."
"After we have done this how do we sleep at night?" the gossip monger asked just like a host doing a personal interview of his guests.
"Peaceful. We don't have to worry that someone would creep into our home, taking us unaware and threatening the safety of our family in the middle of the night."
"Someone would always come and replace this one we killed."
"I have an idea. Tomorrow, we're going to call anonymously to the police to report the disappearance of one unknown man," the gossip monger suggested.
"We'll get caught," the dentist said fearfully.
"No. The law with insufficient evidence cannot send anyone to jail and with no body there won't be any sufficient evidence," the gossip monger shared his wisdom. He after all filed away in his mind all the pertinent news and information he heard elsewhere.
"So what's the purpose of reporting anonymously to the authorities?"
"To start a gossip to perpetuate the dark reputation of our village," the gossip monger replied cheerfully. "The law cannot convict anyone just because of gossips and rumours but then our village will have the reputation it rightly deserves, the village where thieves disappear. Those undesirables will then stay out."
"We need to hire the stupidest and loudest investigator then," the engineer suggested.
"Yes."
—o0o—
"I have an idea what happened to the body, Naruto," Shikamaru said to his partner.
"Where is the body? Is there even a body? I bet the guy just run off dattebayo," the other investigator replied doubtfully.
"Notice how the corn leaves here are much greener than those we have seen along the way?"
"Hmn…no. It looks the same."
"Notice the stinking smell in the meat vendor's house?"
"Dude, he sells meat for a living. Whadaya expect?"
"Tch."
"Next you're gonna tell me the doctor's eyes are shifty, the engineer laughs a lot, and the dentist smiles too much."
"You noticed too?" Shikamaru was surprise Naruto observed the same things as him.
"Anou-sa, doctor's eyes are shifty out of habit. It's how they show their sympathy while their patients tell them their list of symptoms and then they deduce that whatever's ailing the patient is a hell lot worse than what the patient thinks. The engineer probably laughs a lot because he's drunk. His kind whiles away their afternoons with their foreman and labourers drinking hard after a good day's work. And come on the dentist was just advertising his trade."
Shikamaru just gave Naruto a sharp-eyed look. "Tch, something still feels off."
"The artist that talks too much, have you seen his drawings?"
"Yeah. He seems to typically draw beautiful settings with orange sun, colourful flowers and trees but one, one particular painting is different."
"Yup," Naruto agreed heartily. "You mean the one that looks like grey pulverized rocks oozing red blood?"
"Yeah," Shikamaru replied. "You could tell that all his drawings express a story. But the story I could gather from that particular drawing is weird."
"The tiny pebbles look like crushed bones…" Naruto thought aloud. Then sighing, he mumbled, "Ah well. That's why I hate anything abstract. You can make it to whatever your mind tells you."
Shikamaru shrugged, recognizing the truth in Naruto's words. "And the artist is not reliable anyway. I hear his reputation as a gossip monger and teller of tall tales."
It wasn't too long then before Shikamaru, the senior investigator, with his laziness resurfacing concluded with finality, "Maybe this once, Naruto, you're right, the guy just run off."
Fin.
~10 17, 22 12AF GC~
A/N: Yeah this is fiction. After all you can't take out the whole eye without breaking some bone around it. Trust me, I tried ~insert maniacal laughter~ … Happy Halloween!