Chuck Smalls was, and I say was because I no longer know him, not because he is dead, a small man. His life was filled with small things and his dreams with small wants. His day would start simply with his eyes opening and ended even simpler with his eyes closing. Chuck lived next door to bigger people with bigger wants and bigger dreams, but no one smaller than him. Nothing was remarkable at all about Chuck except for his oversized penis.
Mary Dwyer, who lived two streets and four houses over from Chuck Smalls, worked as his receptionist at Fleishman, Straw and Smalls. She spent many afternoons day-dreaming about Chuck’s oversized penis when not filling away tax returns and posting envelopes with bi-annual audits. Some nights, as she fed her eight year old cat Mr. Andrews, she would wonder which side of Chuck’s shorts his penis was hanging. It was mostly to his right. She had once caught him in his white-cotton boxers as he changed for a business luncheon and had seen his penis protruding from the bottom of the finely-stitched, white-cotton seams.
Those seams were given to Chuck Smalls by his late wife, Audrey Smalls. She had never taken much interest in what went into undergarments, only that they were neatly pressed and ready for Chuck as he got ready of a morning. Audrey Bathton, as she was formerly known, formerly known being what you say when someone changes their name, usually through marriage, grew up in a small, country home, the middle of five children and had learnt from an overworked mother that it was the creases in clothes that showed you loved someone. Chuck’s boxers always had creases you could do architecture with.
Today was a Monday, and Chuck Smalls had decided this would be the day he would kill Mary Dwyer. He had been planning this day since July 16th, 2006. It had been a Sunday. Many days of the week had their names taken from Germanic religious traditions, which was ironic because those very traditions were no longer in current practice. The prevailing traditional practices where Chuck Smalls lived were that of the Judeo-Christian faith, with the deity Yahweh as its patriarchal head. This particular persuasion shares many things with most other popular religions humanity had devised over the past ten thousand years since its Agricultural Revolution, in that it was utter nonsense.
On the day of her death, Mary Dwyer ate oats for breakfast. Not out of want but out of habit. Oats are a species of cereal grain most commonly used to feed horses because it is readily mass produced and very cheap. Many mornings on the farm Mary Dwyer grew up on, outside on the fields, the horses would eat the oats her father would shovel off the back of his 1928 John Deere D model tractor several hours before the sun came up. Inside the small house, Mary and her siblings would eat oats Mary’s mother would shovel out of a hot cook-pot.
As Chuck Smalls entered the offices of Fleishman, Straw and Smalls, his oversized penis was slightly engorged. The thought of killing Mary Dwyer made Chuck’s heart-muscle pump blood faster than usual. The sound it made was thump-tha-thump.