by Julie Helms

Created on: March 16, 2010   Last Updated: June 22, 2011

Digging a scraggly torn fingernail deep into the puss-filled scabby lesion behind his malformed ear, Despair sighed, bored to tears. He flicked the gelatinous matter caught in his fingernail and watched it arc across the room till it simply disappeared.

 “Do something. Anything! Entertain me, Agony.” Despair belched, a putrid greenish smog puffing from his mouth and nostrils.

 In response, the elderly lady on the straw mat below him groaned and her eyes rolled back.

 “You are a loser, Ag. Is that the best you got?” Silence.

 Despair drifted to the opposite corner of the hut, bumping off the grass ceiling. He looked down at the unfortunate lady below him with open hostility. She had eventually been abandoned by her fellow villagers. Abandoned to her demons, they had said. So here she lay, pathetic, unwashed and unwanted,curled into fetal position, a curse upon the village.

 “Alright Agony, it's my turn now.” Despair began pulling on the webby hanks of hair that tufted across his scalp. “My turn. My turn. My turn.”

 The old woman began to writhe and scream, clawing at the edge of the mat. Foam squeezed from the corners of her mouth and several blood vessels burst in the yellowed whites of her eyes.

 Despair worried that Agony might just be warming up finally but it wasn't his turn anymore. Agony had his chance and he had wasted it; it was too late to start now. With a “whoof” of rushing fetid air, Despair dived down from his aerial perch and thunked inside the woman, effectively dislodging Agony by pure force.

 Agony smashed against the far wall, the bile yellow features clearly agitated on his sallow face. He began to claw at one of his leathery wings that was bent at an impossible angle.

 The woman was largely unaware of the action occurring around her though she did feel the change in occupation. The intense pain stopped and a moment of clarity slowly cut through the haze in her mind. The clarity, however, was followed by a huge weight of desolation and despondency. Wave after wave of hopelessness slammed into her.

 The woman was sure that behind it all she could hear, or maybe she could feel it, the low rumble of laughter bubbling up to the surface of her consciousness in viscous clumps.

 Deep within her soul, Despair was indeed laughing. It felt so good to have back a body, that which had been stolen from him in millennia past. He stretched

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