Don't Read the Label

By Evan

A man rests quietly in his 8x8-foot apartment late at night. A figure approaches the door to the apartment and slices through the door with an ax. The hapless victim awakens only to have a dirty sock, which had been soaked in chloroform, shoved into his mouth. The odd assailant stands only about four feet tall but the really unusual physical characteristic he exhibits is that his left eye is green and his right eye is brown. The midget also wore a large nametag, which reads “Hi my name is Richard! To report how effective or ineffective I was at accosting and subduing you, call 579-389-1860.” He then goes out to his Ford Pinto and rolls out a gurney. He puts the unnamed victim onto the gurney, face downward, and pulls a scalpel, scissors, a bag of potato chips and a syringe of morphine. He moves to begin cutting the man but realizes that the gurney is too high up for him to reach. He goes back to his Pinto and grabs a footstool. The footstool is the classical variety with the poem “This little stool of mine, I use it all the time, To reach the things I couldn’t, and lots of things, I shouldn’t.” He steps onto the stool and slices the man open and removes a kidney. He eats his potato chips. Richard then duct tapes the wound closed and dumps the man back into bed. The kidney gets put into Richard’s pocket and Richard departs.

Richard drives along, realizes the kidney is still in his pocket and puts it in a big barrel full of kidneys. To be precise, there are 523 kidneys within the dark confines of the barrel (including the new addition). He arrives at the Canine Crunchies Doggy Treat factory and brings his barrel into the main building.

Inside, he encounters Carl Brown, the owner of the factory. His unusual normality contrasts strongly with Richard. He was about 5 feet 11 inches tall, and so towered over Richard but nobody would glance at him twice in a crowd (except for maybe his mom).

“So did you get enough kidneys for the next shipment of our doggy treats?” Carl queried.

“I procured about 500 kidneys which should be enough when ground up, dried and packed with corn to make it crunchy.”

“Well that’s good news. Our treats need the human kidneys to keep up their popularity, and justify prices in excess of $20 an ounce. Okay well you’re off duty until 5:00 p.m. tomorrow.”

They go their separate ways, Carl back into his office, Richard to try and hit animals with his Pinto, so he would have something to eat. Richard is deep in thought. He'd heard on television that there is a concept called "a social life". It apparently involves, dancing and talking a lot. He decides that creating roadkill is the most fun he could have as his physical deformities probably preclude his getting a social life. Besides, people are just slabs of meat anyway. He then whiles away the night hours hitting five armadillos, six opossums, twelve squirrels, and a deer. He then eats them and stamps a little mark on his truck for each animal. He has over 10,000 marks of various animals that he has hit with his truck. He had redesigned his truck so that the front bumper was incredibly sturdy, to the extent that he could hit a moose and his truck would be fine.

His rather vicious stalking of dead animals could be traced to his abandonment by his parents. They were members of a cult who believed that the world had been laid out of the hind portion of the Almighty Chicken. They had believed at the time that he was a demon sent to destroy the work of the great and holy chicken god because of the strangeness of his eye color. They threw poor Richard out of their house, (Actually at that point the only name he had was Buqockwarksquawk, which translates roughly to mean, evil demon who wishes to thwart the wishes of the almighty chicken). Thus satisfied that they had done the holy work of the Almighty Chicken, the one who lays all things, they returned home to plan a bomb attack against Kentucky Fried Chicken. A family of alligators raised him for twenty years until Carl Brown found him and taught him to drive and talk. Richard never lost his desire to kill things and eat them however. The only reason he works for Carl at all is that he needs the money to buy gas for his Pinto so he can hit animals.

The next morning at the city police station, Lieutenant Bob arrives to find his office in total pandemonium. Apparently they’d run out of coffee. Thankfully he has an espresso machine in his safe. He drinks his coffee and read the reports from the night shift. The report of 523 nearly identical incidents of assault and kidney theft caught his eye. He cannot think of what anyone would want with a kidney but he looks at the details of the incidents. They all give a pretty clear description of the assailant and since midgets with different eye colors in each eye aren’t that common he shouldn’t be that hard to find. Also a few of the accounts gave the phone number from the nametag, but calling the number might alert the perpetrator and he would skip town. However, Bob decides to go ahead and call the number, as he has nothing else to do, besides getting doggy treats for his Schnauzer, Erwin.

“Hello, may I please speak to Richard (the name was listed in the reports too)?” Bob asks of the person on the other end of the phone.

“He’s off duty at the moment, may I ask who’s calling?”

“I’m a friend of his and I really need to talk to him.”

“You’re a big fat liar. He can’t make any friends. He views most people as big slabs of meat. The only reason he doesn’t eat people is that he likes squirrels and opossums better than people,” says Carl Brown as he hangs up the phone.

Bob decides to go ahead and get the doggy treats for Erwin and maybe his mind would come up with a solution in the meantime. He gets in his car and drives to the supermarket. He gets a box of Canine Crunchies and realizes that he has no idea what is in them. He could be feeding the dog arsenic for all he knows. He decides to read the label and notices that the comments phone number on the label, 579-389-1860 is the same as the number in his reports. He also notices that the main ingredients are corn and human kidneys.

He takes a few fellow officers with him to the factory late the following night and they arrest Carl Brown but Richard evades them. They are forced to engage in a high-speed chase with him. Richard attempts a tactic that worked for his alligator family and hides his head out of site. This is not good for him, however, since he lacks the protruding eyes of an alligator and so he swerves back and forth on the road. Bob’s car lightly taps the rear bumper of the Pinto in the chase, which promptly explodes. Bob’s car remains intact.

Bob has some difficulty determining what to charge Carl with, since he didn’t actually commit the acts of assault and kidney theft. He decides to book Carl on 523 counts as an accessory to breaking and entering, assault, and theft of kidneys.

Carl’s trial ends in a guilty verdict but the judge shows him mercy and he is given only 1569 years (one year for each charge) in prison. Everybody else lives happily ever after, except for, Richard who is dead, the 523 people who lost their kidneys and Erwin, who can no longer get any Canine Crunchies. So actually everybody but Bob’s life pretty much stinks after this point.

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