Short Story: The Little Man in My Spine

The unmistakable yellow light instantaneously morphs into a frightening red orb as I glide through the battlefield, its power stopping thousand pound machines. Yet, something underneath my epidermis, underneath my tiny veins, even underneath my bones awakes at this sheer moment of rebellion.

Screeching an unbearable tune, a little man no larger than a micron stumbles over to his alarm and prepares for the assault.

Assault?!

An invisible syringe injects 60 units of optimism in my veins, immediately cultivating a grin worth a thousand words across my face. In a nanosecond I feel him. His foot, full speed at my spine. My back cringes. My mind longs for that invisible syringe...

In a millisecond, he has vanished. The pain is gone and I am back to “normal.”

xxx

He has no name. He has minimal personality. Only appearing in moments of sheer insubordination, my decision in pursuing something verboten leads to our courting.

His home, you ask?

Slightly off center in my lumbar vertebrae he has crafted a beautiful villa, overlooking the sea of blood vessels that travel day in and day out. Living the most lavishly of all workers in the human body, he preoccupies himself with two main duties – cleaning and sleeping. Each room is decorated with anatomical references: the “intestinal” hallway, “pulmonary” den and “histological” play room, to name a few. And each of these rooms sports a brilliantly colored alarm. An alarm that once rung, resonates through the whole villa causing this little man to quickly stop cleaning (or sleeping). In such dire moments, he sprints to his garage, jumps in his gondola and whizzes down to the lower spine.

Expletives generally emerge from his one toothed mouth when the alarm sounds – the mother fucker hates his job (unfortunately, he inherited the job from his father). In picoseconds he begins thrashing at my lower spine, initiating the most unbelievable psychological and physical pains.

His twin brother plays a similar role, residing in the outskirts of the gut. Although not as militarily advanced as his brother, the twin triumphantly attacks my gut within record time: just as my brain analyzes the situation, heart skips a beat and the man in my lower back begins to emerge, the alarms sound.

Time for this unsettling queasy feeling to spread...

Yet, I can't seem to get enough of it. I can't seem to stop.


These little men hate me more than ever before.

xxx

Someone once asked me to describe my feelings when breaking the law...

I responded, “don't talk to me, talk to the little man in my bones,” and I walked away, grinning and ever so satisfied.

Currently, the little man sleeps and his alarms patiently wait for the next acts of dissent.