His body was a battleground.<\/p>\n
His name was Adam Wright.\u00c2\u00a0 He grew up on Long Island, went to college, got a job, all the things typical American boys do; and at some point, he grew up.\u00c2\u00a0 He became a full-fledged, card-carrying, honest-to-God Man.\u00c2\u00a0 He found a wife.\u00c2\u00a0 He fathered a child.\u00c2\u00a0 He earned promotions and sacked away a fair cache of money and took his family on vacations every summer.<\/p>\n
His wife, Jen, put up with him and his Manliness.\u00c2\u00a0 She earned half the money in the house, and spent more time with their little girl.\u00c2\u00a0 And they loved each other as best they could, which is to say quite a bit.<\/p>\n
The girl, Robin, was only three, barely walking, hardly talking, cute as buttons, a true joy.<\/p>\n
None of them, not even the Man himself, knew the truth about Adam Wright.<\/p>\n
He\u2019d been born, yes, of course, that much was true.\u00c2\u00a0 But he\u2019d been made, too, and fostered, and cared for in unimaginable ways, on an extremely small scale.\u00c2\u00a0 Terra-forming, of a sort, made his skin a perfect field–on the level of microbes.<\/p>\n
There was a reason Adam had no memory of prolonged illness.<\/p>\n
They ploughed his skin, reaped and sowed, designed and built.\u00c2\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t until Adam\u2019s fortieth birthday that he noticed a growth on his hip: a tiny nodule, hard, painless, worrisome.\u00c2\u00a0 He made an appointment with a doctor who told him it was nothing, but perhaps they\u2019d remove it and do a few tests just in case.\u00c2\u00a0 Make sure it wasn\u2019t something malignant.<\/p>\n
What had been known as the Tower of Babel, on the surface of Adam Wright\u2019s skin, was removed by an act of God, or so it seemed, and a thousand little little people disappeared with it.\u00c2\u00a0 A crater marked the spot.\u00c2\u00a0 Flowers were brought, and other monuments.\u00c2\u00a0 Prayers were given.\u00c2\u00a0 And that was where it started.\u00c2\u00a0 Some people, quite frankly, didn\u2019t believe in the power of prayer, not in this instance.\u00c2\u00a0 It was their own hubris that had brought this upon them.\u00c2\u00a0 Their unfailing belief in their manifest destiny.\u00c2\u00a0 Onwards, upwards, everywhere, the culmination of hundreds of generations\u2019 worth of work and study and effort and innovation.<\/p>\n
Protestors arrived.\u00c2\u00a0 Then police.\u00c2\u00a0 Then the military.\u00c2\u00a0 Sides were drawn.\u00c2\u00a0 First blood came, for the little little people, near Adam Wright\u2019s bellybutton shortly after midnight three nights (three years) after the doctor\u2019s small cut.<\/p>\n
He woke from a fitful sleep with a horrible itch.\u00c2\u00a0 In fact, the war between the little little people had already spread.\u00c2\u00a0 To his nipples.\u00c2\u00a0 His fingernails.\u00c2\u00a0 The lobe of his ear.\u00c2\u00a0 He heard ringing, and buzzing, and really nothing at all.<\/p>\n
Adam Wright checked into a spa.\u00c2\u00a0 They catered to his every need, made him feel warm, secure, comfortable.\u00c2\u00a0 They massaged the tension out of his muscles.\u00c2\u00a0 They played sleep-inducing New Age music, flutes and violins without any edge, some all-girl chorus chanting nonsense words.\u00c2\u00a0 They bathed him in mud and scalding hot water.\u00c2\u00a0 They placed hot stones on the small of his back and along his spine.\u00c2\u00a0 They burned incense and sage and scented oils.\u00c2\u00a0 Yet none of it provided any long-term relief; Adam\u2019s skin crawled, it itched, it burned, it sloughed off him in the thinnest of flakes.<\/p>\n
When the doctor reported that the tests showed nothing, Adam turned to a preacher, then a minister, a priest, a travelling salesman, a psychic, a mystic guru, the icon of a saint.\u00c2\u00a0 All save the last made numerous suggestions, pledges, and assurances.\u00c2\u00a0 All save the last failed to deliver on their promises.<\/p>\n
More doctors were brought in, specialists, internists, researchers, grad students, theorists, physicists, chemical engineers.<\/p>\n
After years of war, the battlegrounds spread to every corner of their world, and beyond.\u00c2\u00a0 More powerful weapons were created.\u00c2\u00a0 Sides were official now, and deep-rooted, though no one alive remembered how the war actually started.\u00c2\u00a0 Stories of the Tower of Babel were merely legends, like the monster at Sleepy Hollow, like the ghosts in the Loch.\u00c2\u00a0 Sometimes, the gods struck out blindly at the little little people, ripping into either side seemingly at random; each instance fortified the one against the other.\u00c2\u00a0 Millions died every year (day).\u00c2\u00a0 Warriors were bred, engineered, geneticized.\u00c2\u00a0 Massive machines of massive destruction rolled out.\u00c2\u00a0 Armament outstripped all other arts, even poetry, though the occasional bleeding heart cried out helplessly.<\/p>\n
Finally, one side unleashed the ultimate weapon.<\/p>\n
It happened while Adam Wright lay upon an uncomfortable bed in another doctor\u2019s office.\u00c2\u00a0 Over the past year, things had gotten worse; he\u2019d gone through his life\u2019s savings; his wife, bless her soul, worked extra hours at a second, secret job, just to help with the bills were insurance feared to tread.\u00c2\u00a0 Jen cried a lot more often now, as though she felt her daddy\u2019s pain.\u00c2\u00a0 They weren\u2019t there.\u00c2\u00a0 They weren\u2019t in the doctor\u2019s office when he died.<\/p>\n
One side or the other, it never really mattered which, devised the weapon and, against all measures of common sense and common decency and self-preservation, set it loose.\u00c2\u00a0 It moved like fire, in all directions, rising high into the heavens; it spread, and it spread, and it spread further still, scorching every inch of ground (skin).\u00c2\u00a0 It went everywhere, leaving no one on either side untouched.\u00c2\u00a0 The liquid flames disintegrated cities, ate up every living little little person it could find–and it found them all–and finally reached out so far in every direction that it found itself, immolated itself, and was gone.<\/p>\n
In all of two weeks, it left nothing.<\/p>\n
Two weeks on the skin, though, was barely an hour.\u00c2\u00a0 Adam Wright\u2019s skin charred in a chaotic, but definite, pattern, taking moist human flesh and leaving crisp chunks of charcoal.\u00c2\u00a0 Spontaneous, if somewhat slow-moving, human combustion, they claimed.\u00c2\u00a0 They could claim nothing else.\u00c2\u00a0 By the time Adam\u2019s skin burned completely, the pain had brought first unconsciousness and then lifelessness.\u00c2\u00a0 He went without a whimper, in the end, because he\u2019d cried all the tears that were possible to cry and his nerve endings had basically shut down.<\/p>\n
One group of brave little little persons survived.\u00c2\u00a0 In a rocket built in secret.\u00c2\u00a0 The journey was long, and tiresome, and frightful, but eventually they landed on the pliable flesh of someone, a doctor perhaps, upon whom they could start afresh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"