urban legend

…he looked a lot like that James Bond super villain played by Richard Kiel with a jaw made of iron and sharpened stainless steel teeth. He stood about eight feet, three inches and he measured about six ax-handles across the shoulders. He could grip a twenty-five pound thanksgiving turkey between each knuckle of his massive mitts. He spit when he talked and a stench like an open septic tank at a refugee camp was emitted from his gaping maw. He wore a huge potato sack stained with urine for a shirt and his “pants” were merely percale queen size Vera sheets stained with like a half gallon of feces. His hair was a tempestuous haystack tangled like an Australian rugby scrum. He roared and fumed. He tore a computer in two with his bare hands, cleaved a carrel with a prodigious blow and strode up to the reference desk and boomed in a voice like Darth Vader “hey, you fucking civil service faggot! Your mother is a whore, your father was a scalper and I am going to poke your eyes out and skull fuck you in front of all these lousy little pukes!!! As he pronounced the last words he unsheathed a gurka scimitar as long as your arm and swung it at my face, slicing the eyelid almost clean off as I lurched backwards. His left hand thundered down on my occipital, causing me to see stars and again the blade swished past my right ear as Michael dove toward the Family Search CD towers. I duck walked toward the end of the desk as Michael took an off-balance haymaker at the back of the giant’s head but the monster caught me by back of my sport shirt and swung me like a hammer being thrown by one of the Press sisters of the Soviet Union’s track and field glory days. I bounced off the new gen-bookcase, boomeranged off the Wall Chart of History cases, flipped out the door with my back corkscrewing and sickening pops and snaps of tendon and bone. When I came to I was stretched out in a pool of blood and broken glass out on the landing while the jackbooted behemoth bore down on me, ready to finish the job. The only weapon I had was my identification badge which I lodged into my right hand and swung upwards with all my might. I caught him just below the solar plexus and he grunted low and hard. I twisted the lanyard around his femoral artery and held on as he rained blow after blow down on my kidneys. There was a metallic taste in my mouth and blood dripped from my lower extremities. I said goodbye to Katya, I thought of the Dodger pennant I would not live to see, I wondered about donuts on Saturdays for the rest of the staff. Yet, just before I started to black out I felt the impact of the blows lessen and the thudding slow. The lanyard twisted about the artery was beginning to take its effect. It was at that point that I saw a copy of “Descendants of Confederate Veterans of Valdosta Georgia at the Conclusion of the War Between the States” in a tidy, full bind with sharp corners. With the last ounce of my strength I bent my trembling knees and brought it up hard, directly into his oak tree like neck. The corner of the tome caught him just below the jugular vein and tore a hole the size of a Titelist 100 compression golf ball, right through the leathery flesh. Blood poured like cheap vin rouge from a two-gallon carboy, soaking me, the tiles and the glass with crimson. He gasped, fell to his knees, gurgled one last curse “you…you…you…fucking…sissy…librarians…I’ll sue…I’ll…Then, all was silence. That’s about all I remember, just that and waking up in the hospital with Micah standing over me wiping her eyes and lips…