The Tinweed Man

by Daniel Scott White

  Both men stayed that way, laughing for a good while, at their good fortune of having met each other in a world full of evil, a world full of people who would have looked down on them in shame. Samsuch shared the berries with the little man. It had only been the long thorns on the long-thorn berry branch that had caused him to scream, when they had pierced his hand. As they looked up at the sky above them, the rain decided it was time to return to their neck of the woods and depart from the clouds. Making its way earthward, pouring out in abundance, the downpour sent both men scurrying for any form of shelter they could find. Samsuch hid under a tree and Jon Tinweed hid under a toadstool.

  As they hid from the rain, a creature of the most curious nature came ambling past them, appearing out of nowhere, from just around the bend in the trail. This was one of those rare things, a creature that appears to be invisible in broad daylight but becomes plain to see whenever doused in rainwater. The creature is so rare that no one had ever seen one before. Scientists hadn’t even had a chance to classify it, because the science of classification of creatures in the deep woods hadn’t been introduced in this part of the world yet.

  This creature, which wanted to be called by the name of Hunk, but wasn’t actually ever called by that name, because no one had ever called it anything before, had one terrible fear. That was the fear of rainwater. Not only did water from the sky make the creature visible to the human eye, it also had the reverse effect on the creature’s vision. Suddenly, what had looked clear as daylight to Hunk became blurry. Being at a point of extreme vulnerability, Hunk sought for shelter, any shelter he could find. This is how he pushed Samsuch back out into the rain and took over his hiding place under the exact same tree.

  As Hunk settled down to wait for the rain to stop, his vision cleared, but only by the least amount. It cleared enough for him to spy Jon Tinweed under a toadstool nearby. But his vision hadn’t cleared much at all, as rainwater was still dripping down on his blotchy and ill-patterned fur. Thinking the little man might be a toad, he attempted to eat Jon Tinweed, because Hunk loved to dine on fresh toad. He picked up the little man by his leg and put one of Jon Tinweed’s feet into his mouth and proceeded to suck off his shoe.

  The shoe came away from his foot and slid smoothly down Hunk’s coarse gullet without much resistance. It might have been something in the creature’s saliva that had caused the foot to shrink or the shoe to swell, but we’ll never know, because we’ll never meet a creature like Hunk, which means we won’t be able to analyze him scientifically. In any case, the little man had now managed to lose a shoe twice, both times taken away from him by one of those strangest of creatures only found in the deep dark woods.

  Little did Hunk know that some of Jon Tinweed’s excrement still clung to the crevices in the bottom of his shoe, now hard as a rock. And when that hit Hunk’s stomach and dissolved, magical creature or not, the resulting combination was unpleasant to Hunk’s inner workings in ways unimaginable. Out came the shoe in a hurry, flung through the air at a tremendous velocity, hitting unsuspecting Samsuch in the face. The application of Hunk’s stomach juices and the little man’s feces didn’t give poor Samsuch much of a fighting chance. He was knocked out in a flash.

  The sun shone brightly, the rain dried up and Hunk went back to being invisible. Eventually, with a good kick to the gut from the little man, shoe intact, Samsuch woke up. They regrouped and returned to the path, in search of the Spring of Truth, for whatever that was worth. Hunk followed after them. The thing about Hunk that you have to understand is that his kind of species wasn’t vast in numbers. In fact, he might be a one-of-a-kind. And that meant he had no friends. And everybody needs friends, don’t they? He followed the pair up the mountain path, jumping from rock to rock, happy as a kitten living in a shoe box.

  The day passed in a flourish. The path they were on was much shorter than the path the other party had taken. They arrived near to the Spring of Truth by nightfall and set up camp. Jon Tinweed had never camped in the wild before, although he came from a race who knew an encyclopedia’s worth about such things. He had ventured into the woods from time to time, in search of a new home, but he always returned to his shoe box by nightfall.

  He sat and watched as Samsuch worked. Samsuch, still sore in the gut from being kicked, didn’t like this arrangement much. He’d been the laughing-stock of his tribe for many reasons, one being his outdoors skills. He couldn’t catch an animal and skin it. Samsuch couldn’t collect the right medicinal herbs to treat wounds. But this warrior could build a shelter. And he knew that to build a proper shelter, you needed two pairs of hands. Idle hands are better shoved into the fire, so a local saying goes.

  “Bee bop bitty bitty bop!” he yelled at the little man to no avail.

  The little man didn’t understand a word of what he was hearing. It looked like Samsuch was doing a mighty fine job at putting a roof over their heads. Why the sudden animosity?

  Hunk, watching from a distance, had no idea what to think. He thrived day after day more on pure observation and experimentation than any textbook theory about social integration. If he saw something that looked good, he ate it, such as a shoe on a foot. He saw no need to help either Samsuch or Jon Tinweed in whatever folly they were pursuing. Hunk didn’t need a shelter for the night.

  Samsuch became so disillusioned with the current arrangement that he wondered if his colleagues had been right. Maybe he should pick up the little man by his stinking shoe and toss him in the Spring of Truth by himself? The fact that the other warriors weren’t here hadn’t surprise him. They’d probably turned around and were sitting around a warm campfire by now, with the rest of the tribe, having a good laugh and a drink of berry juice. They must have hidden in the trees along the side of the trail, and since he wasn’t much of a tracker in the woods, he hadn’t noticed them there.

  If Jon Tinweed was really worthy of joining the tribe, he’d float, not sink, in the Spring of Truth: the thought festered in Samsuch’s brain and grew to a raging boil. He’d been finding branches for the roof of the shelter for over an hour and his visible companion was only sitting there and watching. Samsuch wasn’t aware that Hunk was also watching, something that would have irked him to no end.

  Hunk wasn’t much of a thinker, but he did have a taste for things, edible things. Possibly it had only been the one shoe that had caused his indigestion? Maybe the other one would go down much better? There was only one way to find out. Putting off the inevitable would only make his hunger grow more demanding. Why not just try the other shoe? It couldn’t hurt to try it, could it? Just a taste would do. He’d never know, just by sitting there and observing, if the clean shoe tasted good. He had to experiment. It was in his nature. In this case, observation wasn’t enough.

  “Ho hum,” Jon Tinweed said and let out a yawn.

  That was enough to set Samsuch on fire. Not literally on fire, not like when he’d fallen into the fire and burned off his eyebrows. It was enough to make him explode. But not literally explode. It was enough to, to, well, to make him think about what a terrible world this was and how life wasn’t fair and how his colleagues had been right about not trusting this no good little man from the Old World.

  Whatever “ho hum” meant in Old World talk, it didn’t go over well with Samsuch. He was a savage, a man of the wild, and poor hunting skills or not, he would demand that the little man do more than just waste the last remaining rays of daylight watching him work. To him, watching was observing, and observing was idleness. This was a time for action.

  He screamed. Samsuch let out such a primal scream that it shook the leaves on the trees on the other side of the planet. The earth’s tilt changed, his scream was so deep. The little man thought Samsuch might have seen a spider on his head, so he brushed at his hair, but in fact he had no hair, already forgetting it had been chopped off the day before. Samsuch may not have been a great warrior, but he could scream.

  Hunk was on a path to intercept the shoe, looking so tasty and delight
ful in the setting sun. His vision had adjusted, working better in the twilight than in the day, and he zoned in on the shoe without hesitation. But he was too late. Samsuch grabbed Jon Tinweed by the leg and lofted him into the air, flinging him far out over the Spring of Truth. Hunk went sailing through the air after him, invisible to Samsuch and Jon Tinweed, and not noticing the clean shoe had come off. It was still in Samsuch’s hand.

  Jon Tinweed rarely took a bath. He hated water. And when he did bathe once a year, his shoes never came off. His shoes never came off when he slept. They never came off at all. Shoes were a sign of civilization.

  Inside his shoes, his feet were downright filthy. They were more like a pair of roots settled firmly in the dirt than something that one would call appendages. In fact, if he hadn’t worn shoes, he might have become planted in the earth. That’s how dirty his feet were.

  Hunk grabbed hold of the little man mid-flight and shoved the squirming foot into his mouth as far as it would go. But there was no shoe there to suck off! He’d been robbed. There was only filth there on the length of Hunk’s tongue. With a splash they hit the water in unison, attached together as they were.

  The wood nymph, long ago having left her tree with the help of the little man, had no idea where to go next. She’d never been outside her tree before. Having no clue about the real world, being a magical creature that had no place in reality, she’d decided to follow Jon Tinweed across the ocean. He was rather handsome, especially since he’d recently cut his hair. And now she was here, hiding in and among the trees in the grove that surrounded the Spring of Truth. When she saw the little man submerged beneath the water, she paused to consider if she should do anything about it. She thought long and hard, because he hadn’t come up back up after a long time.

  When he’d sunk into the water, pulled down by something hugging his foot, something he couldn’t shake off, the first thing that happened was that years of filth on his body came off, forming a slick on the surface of spring. The Spring of Truth wasn’t really a Spring of Truth at all. It was just a place the elders went to in search of answer to questions they already knew the answers to. They used it to trick the younger members of the tribe into doing things they wanted. If the answer had come from the Spring of Truth, how could anyone question it? This was a fun joke the elders played on the youth, just for sport.

  The Spring of Truth had a good deal of sulfuric gas in it, often bubbling up to the surface. If you listened closely, you’d swear you heard someone talking, as the bubbles burst. And if you breathed in deeply and didn’t pass out, you might start to really imagine you’d been told the truth from spirits of another world. You’d see things that weren’t really there.

  As soon as Hunk hit the water, he became visible and his eyesight went all wrong. He was holding onto something that was moving, and he hoped that something could swim, because he couldn’t. He spit out the foot underwater, not having found any shoe there and being disgusted with the taste of the little man’s dirty foot. But he wouldn’t let go of his one chance for survival. If he sank to the bottom alone, he would be lost from scientific classification forever.

  The tree nymph finally made up her mind and went in after Jon Tinweed. Samsuch stood with the shoe in his hand by the water’s edge, watching, waiting, wondering how short his life might become if he played the hero. Then he jumped into the water to save the little man, his only friend in the world, since his comrades had abandoned him.

  The gas in the spring, the unclassified creature Hunk and his mysterious saliva, and years of filth from Jon Tinweed’s feet, a nymph from a tree in the Old Word, and a native with no eyebrows, it was all much more than nature was ever meant to handle at one time. In that combination, never concocted in such a way before, the mixture was likely to explode at any minute, if someone threw in a match, or even just a spark, into the spring.

  The wood nymph was just such a spark. She was of a normal color for the most part, but sometimes glowed a deep bluish color when she was pondering the deepest mysteries of the universe, such as why Jon Tinweed was so self-absorbed all the time. Deeper into the Spring of Truth she dived, in a sincere attempt to help save the little man, the savior who had freed her from the confines of the tree she had grown up inside. Down he sank and down she went. She pondered his true nature as she dived and began to glow.

  Samsuch, thinking the little man had not yet sunk to the bottom, let go the shoe in the water. It was causing a strange color and making it difficult for him to swim.

  The Spring of Truth had had enough, too much, in fact. There was a rift in time. The curved nature of space split open. It curved and curved and then couldn’t curve any farther and then it was rent in two, creating a paradox, a hole into another dimension, a backward curve in time. All the water in the spring exploded in a flash.

  The four creatures were left on the bottom, dazed, covered in mud. The landscape they saw when they regained their senses resembled Hell, steam rising everywhere. The old thin bones of souls long passed away after their bodies had been bound and thrown into the spring stuck out of the walls of the pit at odd angles, without pattern or purpose.

  Hunk, being wet, was fully visible. The nymph had gotten her wings covered so thick with mud that she couldn’t fly. Samsuch was rattled, unable to open his eyes for long due to his internal state of fear. Only Jon Tinweed who had experienced many odd adventures in his life was in the least bit disconnected from reality.

  The little man scratched his head where his hair had been and noticed his missing shoe in the mud, not far from him. He thought the shoe might be useful in plugging the hole where the spring was starting to fill up again. He thought about it in earnest, because he’d never had time to learn how to swim. What good was swimming when your arms only stretched out so far?

  Try as hard as they could, none of them could get out of the pit. Not one of them was able to climb uphill through the steaming mud. They all gave up, exhausted.

  Hunk tasted a bone on the bottom of the spring and discovered it wasn’t as brittle as it looked. Somehow the water had petrified it. He nearly broke his teeth before spitting it out. The bone stuck in the side of the pit and Jon Tinweed grabbed it, using it to pull himself back on his feet. The others looked at him, one shoe on and one missing. He nearly fell over, being unstable in that condition. More mud slide down into the spring and his companions hugged each other in panic. Reality was hitting home for them hard.

  The cave troll, the same one that had eaten the comrades of Samsuch, had heard a tumultuous sound when the spring exploded into the atmosphere. The troll liked to use the spring, not to bathe, but to urinate. When the troll arrived, he couldn’t see the bottom, as the steam rising up covered any signs of what might be going on down there. Little did it matter. The troll had to pee. He pulled out his member and let go a strong shower, raining down a toxic mixture of his own on the heads of the four creatures below.

  Troll piss is strong enough to discombobulate your DNA for eternity. What happens is things deep inside your body start to grow. Like tumors. Like extra appendages. Like acne. And those things don’t all grow in a uniform way. Some parts grow faster and some not at all, leaving you looking much like any other greatly feared troll.

  Samsuch, already tall, grew a lot taller within the blink of an eye. And his eyes did brink, stinging by the burn of troll pee raining down on him. Hunk grew and transformed into another creature never before mapped out by science, but that wasn’t anything to write home about because he’d already been one such creature, one of a kind. The tree nymph fought back against the overwhelming power of the troll’s piss and managed to stay beautiful, even though her feminine features were now three times too big. Jon Tinweed noticed that transformation with glee. And even then, as he smiled, the little man grew to a size he’d never before imagined. He became the full height of a man, a regular man, and not the shortest of all the creatures in the rest of the world. Without warning, he was in heaven.

  The troll up abov
e slipped, as the side of the spring was muddy, and fell. He slid all the way to the bottom, where he met up with four other trolls, one quite beautiful. Together they were stuck and together they would have to get out. They pushed and pulled against each other. They used old bones to climb, a great team building activity often recommended by CEOs trying to resurrect failing companies, until they were standing on firm ground, far away from the edge of the spring. The spring, under great pressure, forced Jon Tinweed’s shoe out of the hole and filled up again. His shoe was launched in the air like a rocket and is said to be waiting for discover somewhere on the dark side of the moon.

  These creatures became the legendary gang of Five Trolls that roamed the wild long before anyone from the civilized world came to live permanently in the New World. They were greatly feared by the tribal people who inhabited the land. They ate whatever they wanted and terrorized children when mentioned in bedtime stories.

  Today, we can find images of them carved in caves in the wild. Archaeologists, after inspecting the images, have often wondered why one of them is always depicted missing a shoe...

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