Little Men

The castle walls seemed to vibrate and pulse. The minotaur kept fucking with the little men that scrambled in and out of my treasure horde. Goddamn brainless minotaur. Don’t they know I can just bite their heads off? Quit stealing the little men.

The keystrokes and the mouse movements were my limbs. The monitor was my eyes. That drug was like no other, or maybe the video game itself was made for the drug. The interview room had faded away hours ago (or was it minutes?) The interviewers were watching me play, yet I was not playing, I was living.

It had started as a green floor, a blue sky. When I moved my head to look away from the screen my vision blurred and burned like going from complete darkness into the fires of hell.

There was nothing. I had moved the mouse, ran my hands across every key. No input, no reaction, not even a god damned mouse pointer. I tried to turn and ask, but the burning in my eyes quickly turned into pulsing and pain. I tried to speak and found my mouth had gone dry.

Then the little men had come, wandering in from the endless horizon. They seemed so lost, so confused, wandering around in the ridged flatness of the undeveloped virtual world.

I grabbed one. Was it my hand? I put him in a box, put a label on the box. I grabbed another, put him in a different box. They kept coming and coming, and soon the boxes filled the screen, and it became very difficult to find a spot to lay a box without crushing the little men.

So I built a castle out of the boxes. For some reason the little men knew that the castle was home. As soon as the layout was complete, they began wandering in the castle without my intervention whatsoever.

I felt smug until the minotaurs showed up. They scared me, brought a deep dread within my heart. When I saw them grab the little men, and gobble them up whole, it brought a deep pain within my heart that I had not felt since losing a close friend, or overcoming some tragic event.

I felt my hand clench into a fist. Yet could it be my fist? My hand still gripped the mouse tightly, but I’m sure it was mine. They were small compared to my godlike stature. I could crush them in my mighty hand.

I closed in on the minotaur, leaped at it and swung down in a flying punch attack. The minotaur quickly turned and it swung. The ax connected with my hand and sliced the inside of my palm.

Click.