Done

DONE

George Costa's body was done.

He looked as bloodied and bruised as a man who has fallen from a four-story building, or been tied to the front of a truck and run into a brick wall. The extraction of his tongue, the severing of his thumbs, and castration with pliers, had all been done within hours of his capture, and still George Costa had no idea what his tormentor wanted.

When the man entered George's house, he pulled him out of bed and roughly dragged him to the garage screaming and kicking.

"Please, tell me," George begged. "Who are you? What have I ever done to hurt you?"

"Done?" the big-eyed man asked, as though the meaning of the word eluded him. "Not yet."

There was something strange about the man's eyes…something there wasn’t a word for. He was tall, his fingers and hands twice the size and length of a normal man, and he had a cadaverous paleness and gaunt face, like the body of an anorexic.

With superhuman strength, he held George down, stripped him of his pajamas, and grabbed a pair of pliers.

Stark fear widened George's eyes; sheer terror clenched and locked his jaws shut.

Later, he cut into his guts. George watched him bend to the savage work, his long fingers digging into his fleshy ruins, searching for grisly morsels like a pig for truffles.

The excision of his eyes came next with an old rusty spoon he found in George's tool box.

Then he shattered his legs into bone splinters and dust with a hammer.

"There," he said, "I am done."

He grabbed George by the armpits and tried to stand him up. His ravaged body issued no surprise, no groan, no resistance, then tumbled back to the cold, bloody cement and died in a crimson heap.


(300 words)