Tiny Shifts (Part III)

--- Continuing From Here ---

Dana sat down heavily on one of the barstools, and Paul thought it was a good thing she did, because he felt his own legs go rubbery at the sight of Tiny. For a moment, Paul thought he might just faint dead away like Dana had earlier.

A dozen or so braids of bright red hair stemmed from Tiny’s fat, platter-sized head, cascading around his porcine features, reaching nearly to the floor. His legs were the size of tree trunks. Their fleshy white skin shook and jiggled with each step, like globs of dough on a bread truck. The skin of his bare feet spread out with the burden of supporting his weight and his step was wide to keep his thighs from rubbing together. A belly the size and lumpiness of the thing they’d called Relic, and a color to match that of his legs, led him along, shoving things aside without discretion. Resting atop the mammoth stomach were breasts that looked like pasty, white windsocks on a runway, tipped with bright red nipples the size of dinner plates. A plump, purple stem of a penis and two purple bulbs hid below the rolls of his belly, peaking out intermittently as the blubber shifted from side to side as he walked.

“Jesus,” Paul said in Dana’s ear. “How can this guy carry himself around?”

“He freaking naked,” was her response.

“I am very strong and agile for a man my size,” Tiny said from several feet away, surprising Paul.

The big man crouched a little, and then sprang up with amazing alacrity, turned a back flip, and landed square on his feet. The entire floor shook with the sudden shift of such a payload, and Paul’s mind shook at what he’d just witnessed. Jesus Christ in a fucking cereal box!!, he thought.

“This is my place, and I do not wish to wear clothes, young lady. Besides, some garments can be so restraining.” Snot and spit were smeared around his mouth, leaving the dots of cold sores on his lower lip slick and shiny.

Dana looked at Paul, her expression of shock matching his.

“So you know there is no need to whisper, for I hear all,” Tiny said, his voice many octaves below Paul’s and lyrical with a covert British/French accent. “But let us get to the matter at hand.”

Tiny thundered up to them, looked at the near-empty beer bottles in front of them on the bar.

“Steve,” he said to the bartender. Steve set two more beers down.

“Thank you very much,” Paul said. “But that’s not necessary. We were just on our way out.”

Tiny’s eyes roamed all over both of them, first looking Paul up and down, then checking Dana out with the same vigor. “Why are you here?” he said finally.

“We . . . Just to have a drink,” Dana said.

“I mean why are you here?” Tiny said, but this time emphasized the word ‘you.’

Paul and Dana looked at each other.

“We don’t understand what you mean,” Paul said. “You see, we were driving home, and we saw your sign through the trees. We thought it would be fun to stop and see what Tiny’s was like.”

“Fisk?” Tiny boomed.

“Not sure,” Mr. Fisk said. “I can’t figure it out. Nothing I can see tells me they should be here.”

Tiny went back to his intense inspection. The others began to murmur with speculative nods at each other.

“Paul and Dana,” Tiny said, still regarding them thoroughly. “What is it like out there?”

“Out there?” Dana asked. “What’s it like out where?”

“It’s clear and warm,” Paul offered.

“You really don’t know where you are, do you?” Tiny laughed. “What is it like out there? In your time?”

“In our time?” Paul said

“Yes. By the way you are dressed, I would say it is 1995, 1998 out there tonight.”

“It’s actually 2008,” Paul said, and with a bit of hastiness, “and we should be getting back to it. So, let me pay for these beers, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Could it be that you’ve arrived by accident?” Tiny was blocking their path to the door with his mass. “Fisk, that would certainly be a first.”

“Yes it would,” Mr. Fisk agreed.

Steve slid a Frisbee-sized steak and a platter full of fried potatoes in front of Tiny, along with several mugs of dark beer.

“Such a shame,” Tiny said, nibbling on a fry. “If you two don’t belong here that is. But rules are rules.”

Tiny picked up the steak with his bare hand, stuffed a third of it in his mouth, and ripped it away from the rest. He tossed the remaining hunk of meat back onto the plate and wiped his greasy hand on the side of his belly. The meat in his mouth he chewed only twice and swallowed, chasing it with an entire mug of the dark beer.

“Look,” Paul said, trying to remain nonchalant. “You say we’re not supposed to be here, so we’ll leave. We didn’t mean any harm by coming.”

“That would not be following the rules.” Tiny finished off another huge bite of the steak and two handfuls of fries in the same gluttonous manner.

“What are the rules?” Dana asked.

Tiny chugged another beer, letting a good portion of the mug’s contents spill over his girth. After a vibrating, wet belch, he said, “The rules are simple. Either you stay here or you die.”

“Stay here or die?” Dana repeated as though not sure she’d heard correctly.

“How long do we have to stay here?” Paul asked, thinking they could put up with the strangeness for a while, and then get the hell out of there. His question unexpectedly brought gales of laughter from the crowd.

Tiny had been eating the rest of the steak, and he coughed it back up laughing. The partially chewed meat landed on the bar. He pushed a few stray red braids back over his chunky shoulders. “You either stay here or you die.”

“After midnight, Tiny’s won’t be here anymore,” Mr. Fisk explained.

Paul checked his watch. It was eleven forty already.

“Are you closing down?” Dana asked. She was not looking well. Paul was beginning to regret bringing her here.

“No,” Mr. Fisk responded. “Tiny’s won’t be here anymore.”

“What will happen to it?” Paul asked, trying to sound interested. Maybe he could sway the unusual and dangerous talk to something more mundane.

“It will do what it does,” Tiny responded cryptically, starting in on another handful of fries and a beer. “But we should get back to you.” He indicated Paul and Dana. “Why are you here?”

“By accident,” Paul offered. “Just like you said.”

The patrons mumbled secret conversations around the room, their gestures appearing as though several small arguments had erupted.

“You shouldn’t take my banter with Fisk to heart. There are no accidents,” Tiny said, bringing an end to the muffled debates.

“What do you mean by that?” Dana asked.

“Where Tiny’s is concerned there are no accidents. People don’t arrive here by accident.” He gnawed at the piece of steak he’d coughed up laughing earlier. “Look at us,” he said with a mouthful of meat. “It is plainly evident why some of us are here. Fisk, Relic, One-armed Sandy, Old Blue and I are just some of the folks here that seem out of the ordinary to you, am I right?”

“Well, I suppose you are an unusual collection of people,” Paul agreed, deploying his best air of diplomacy.

“There are others like us here, only you haven’t seen them yet,” Tiny said, jerking his head back toward the dark hallway. “You may not be ready to see them so soon. They are more . . . . . . severe than you could handle at this point.”

“So are you saying this is a place where unusual people can congregate to be with others like themselves?” Paul asked, not wanting to think about what creatures might exist down the dark hallway. If they were more ‘severe’ than Tiny or Relic, he’d rather not meet them.

“That’s part of it,” the fat man said. “But you’ll notice that some of us are like you.”

Paul looked around the room. Steve, the bartender, the cowboy that had been dancing with One-armed Sandy, the man in the yellow suit that had been videotaping them, the whaler playing pool with Old Blue, and even the butch woman in fatigues, Lizzy, were all fairly normal-looking in the scheme of things. And there were others looking on at the tables around the bar that Paul thought he wouldn’t think twice about if he saw them on the street.

“What’s their story?” Dana asked timidly.

“As I said, no one comes here by accident,” Tiny continued. “The folks you see here were either denigrated, ridiculed, and cast out by their respective communities and they’ve come here for protection and camaraderie, or they were destined to endanger the lives of many people on the outside, and they’ve been called here to keep innocent people from being harmed.”

“When you say, ‘called here,’ what do you mean?” Paul was intrigued.

“Something draws them here. We are not long at any one point, so conditions must be right, but something draws those folks here, those that are otherwise good people, but who would be a great detriment to their fellow man if they didn’t come.”
“What kind of detriment?”

“It’s difficult to say,” Tiny said. “Steve here is a great bartender, but he had a habit of serving folks even after they’d had too much. It’s possible one of his customers might have been hurt driving home, but it’s more likely that one of them would have hurt many people after leaving Steve’s bar. So he was called here one night in the early nineteen seventies. No one leaves Tiny’s, so no one will ever be hurt by his inability to stop serving a drunk. The others have similar reasons for being called, as I assume you two have.”

Paul and Dana exchanged a look of understanding. He could see that she was thinking the same thing he was. They had been discussing it earlier, just before turning off the highway. Paul’s aggressiveness on the river had always had their friends on the edge of danger and that day had tossed their good friend, Tony, into the water and he’d injured his knee.

Had Tiny’s called Paul there to keep him from causing real harm to others?

Paul had been the one that saw the sign. He had been the one that suggested they come in for a drink. He had been the one who’d seen the cars, the horses, and the patrons, not Dana.

Maybe Paul had been called here, but something struck him as obvious and it carried with it a great measure of guilt. Dana had not been called here. Tiny was wrong. Some people did come here by accident. And Dana was proof of that. He had to get them out. He had to get her out.

“We’ve got to go,” he said, grabbing Dana by the hand. He started to walk, but Tiny moved in front of them.

“You can’t leave,” he said. “In a few minutes we will no longer be in this place. You must stay with us.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” Paul said. “But we’re leaving.”

“Don’t you get it? We have people with us from just about every time period throughout history. Why, Fisk here was born four hundred years before you. Tiny’s only stays in one period of time for one night. It is now almost midnight and we will move to another point in time. You see, tomorrow, this place won’t be here. It will be in another time. And not a time of my choosing.”

“What? Just some random time?”

“No. I told you that people with the potential to cause others harm are called here, but actually it is a two-way street. People also call Tiny’s.”

“What are you saying?” Paul asked, still holding tight to Dana’s hand.

“You two called Tiny’s to this time,” the fat man said. “You brought us here, and you were brought to us.”

“No, that’s a load of bullshit,” Paul insisted. “We’re going home.”

He took one step toward Tiny and the floor began to rumble and vibrate. A cheer went up from the patrons in the bar. Mr. Fisk sat down on one of the barstools, and Tiny smiled at Paul.

--- To Be Continued ---