THE DWARF

Clovis is the dwarf of the Roubet market. He will read your future for only ten credits. He just has to lick your skin. Adrianne sits at the wizard’s stall, right beside Bérénice’s—who, for five credits more, becomes your fifteen-minute bride, letting you in her portable, two-by-two sex booth.

“So, what do you see, dwarf?” Adrianne groans after a few minutes’ silence, while Clovis keeps licking her tits. They’re so close to your heart, the taste of your future is strong there, he explained.

“Wait, here…almonds, pistachio, pineapple…these are the tastes of a new encounter…that is going to change your life,” the dwarf says, finally detaching his face from Adrianne’s tits; she has to hold him on her lap.

“What kind of encounter? Speak plainly,” she insists.

The small whorehouse she owns will soon be forced to close. Millander’s sex “franchising” is killing the competition, save Madame Desroches’s girl-custody business; the witch of South Paris 5, decades of honored service for the worst perverts of the city—and beyond. But that’s another story.

For ten credits, Adrianne wants to know more from the visionary dwarf.

“A brawny man, dressed in black and with new shoes: he’s looking for you. The taste of pineapple suggests this…but to be able to tell you more, I should lick you again,” he blabbers.

“I didn’t come here to breast-feed you, you know? Goddamn…so be it, suck a little more, but then, you have to tell me everything about that man.”

The dwarf gets back, sinking between the large, ripe melons of the woman—a maîtresse who has passed her half century, entrusting herself to the divinatory arts of a well-endowed dwarf with bullet shells for teeth, and a locket at his neck with a black and white portrait from a few centuries back: the famous alchemist Cagliostro. The short-legged augur tries to pass off himself as the alchemist’s descendant, on his mother’s side.

“So? What do you feel now?” Adrianne pulls back Clovis by the neck of his shirt, away from her nipples where the pig has glued his face a little too long, lingering in his future tasting.

“Tomato…certainly tomato. Mmmh, that’s not good…” he mysteriously reveals, momentarily taking off his seer hat to scratch his scalp, hardly covered by scarce tufts of red hair staining the lumpy desert working as a lid for his brain, all studded with yellow crusts; the burns of the Uxor rains, which must have fucked him more than once, apparently.

“What? You were telling me about a man who was going to change my life…and now –”

Adrianne cannot even finish her sentence, as someone lifts her from the chair pulling her up by her neck. Shit. The woman ends up with her ass on the ground, sees a nice pair of new shoes in front of her mug. Then, climbing the stranger’s legs with her eyes, she reaches the full figure of the motherfucker. Dressed in black just like the dwarf prophesied, but that…with the red MORBIER logo printed on the chest—a diamond with crossed shinbones—is the uniform of the dreaded leg-cutters: the goons of the notorious Montpellier-based collection agency, operating in all of New France, and reaching out with their tentacles even in other Countries and city-states of Eastern Europe. The chainsaw in his left hand leaves little doubt about it. She is late on the due date, and her lender must have hired the agency, which immediately sent one of its shark-agents to collect in nature, and in public. An aggressive, sanguinary communication strategy toward other debtors. Nothing better than the Roubet market, always congested with deflated souls.

The man with the brand-new shoes kicks Adrianne’s wrinkled mug, tumbling the maîtresse’s body belly-and-tits-up, then he presses the green button turning the chainsaw on; he holds it with both hands, watching the sadistic, lighting-quick acceleration of the chain. He bends over and pushes it into the woman’s legs, just under her knees. He begins slowly moving the tool from left to right.

Adrianne challenges the shriek of the chainsaw with choked screams, awkward and cacophonic. It is an even match of loudness, initially; but when the iron teeth of the leg-cutter’s machine screech against the asphalt—after passing through her flesh and a couple centimeters of empty air—a high note rises solitary, shrill, at least an octave over that chorus of human and mechanical screams, greeted by a festival of sparks.

Adrianne, vibrant red heart of an imaginary Pollock painting, splattered in clear blood on the grey canvas of the asphalt, contaminated by the shell-less snails of ground meat shreds, has used up the fuel of her cries. Unmoving, she looks up at the sky of South Paris 5, overlooking her. That sick, thick, apocalyptic yellow, leaving space only to few solitary morsels of the blue of yore; it perfectly matches her cut-off future, shorter now.

The Morbier leg-cutter—his work done, his new shoes and dark trousers squirted with blood—walks away, vanishing among the freak waves of the excited, sneering crowd, as people rush in hungrily, to fight over the twin chunks of Adrianne’s legs. Split from her body, they look like fat pythons of fresh meat without eyes and mouth, their head raised from the ground and crowned by a crest of toes.

The dwarf sits next to Adrianne, freshly shortened by those metal teeth, hugs her, and whispers in her ear, “See? We’re made for each other, now.”

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