The Others

Sometimes when I walk down the street with a group of people, I imagine us turning into a herd of monsters. Our shoulders bubble up into huge hairy bulges, our necks become thick and knotted ropes, our shirts split at their seams, our backs hunch and twist, and our knuckles scrape along the ground, searching for boulders to break. We slowly pound the length of the earth with our moldy feet, as though it did something wrong, and we gather our strength for a fight. Our deep grunts rise up and out of the decaying depths of our intestines and spread through the air, incomprehensible and offensive. The others cower behind their closed doors, praying the sound of their twisting lock is lost upon our wax laden ears. And it is. We do not hear them, we do not see them. But we do smell them. And oh what a stench.