It had been what felt like over many years that I had been living in paradise and I had not been sick at all. My health was never changing. I never felt energetic or fatigued; pain and pleasure were both distant memories for me. I had an idea of perfection feeling like a great orgasm that never left or weakened in intensity and was disappointed to feel nothing. I could hardly even get a hard-on most of the time. I at least thought that my body would have become mighty and muscular, but my muscles were just a little stronger than they had been in the old world, nowhere near as sturdy as I had hoped. I began to become bored. It took me a year to admit my boredom in my own mind.

“What is my purpose in this new world? What is the purpose of this world at all?” I thought as I was strolling through the jungle and entranced in deep brooding thought. It was then that suddenly a baby bird that had prematurely attempted to leave the security of its mother's nest fell in front of my feet. “That’s it!” I had an epiphany. “I should live my life,” I thought, “for the animals, for nature. I guess that I am God, and it is my duty to make this world even better, to see what man could have done if he were completely selfless.” I lifted the otherwise doomed mortal baby bird from the jungle floor and returned it to its home for a second chance at life.  

Billy and I took off into the wilderness to go see what animals we could help. The first animal in distress we came across was a red and black zebra that we found during our flight through the fluorescent, cinnamon-magenta grasslands. The poor beast was suffering from a broken leg after a tumultuous fall off a hill it was mindlessly grazing on.

 I jumped off Billy’s big blue back to the rescue. I reached into my social services sack and retrieved some rope I had gathered and a few bits of wood to make a splint for the injured quadruped. The thing did not seem to care that it had been saved from its luckless fate or to even notice the pain it must have suffered. The ungrateful animal continued to graze without a thought in the world of its new fortune. After being a little disheartened by the experience, I decided to go home and thought “Maybe I’ll just focus on all of the animals that live near home, just the animals by the hole.

On our way back from the grasslands, I came across a community of coal-black beavers who had been struggling to complete a dam that they had been building seemingly out of their means and capabilities. It wasn’t hard to see that the project was only moments away from failing. Once again, I left Billy in his tracks and came charging to the rescue of my little furry friends.

It was a permanent day that time of year. The only change in the sky was in its color; it was dark green that day and was hard to the tell time, though I believe that I worked for two days straight on the dam, chopping down trees, hacking, sawing, and lugging huge heavy logs around. The more I did to contribute to completing the dam, the less the beavers helped. On top of my methods of building being too sophisticated for a beaver, it was also unnecessary that they lend a hand simply because it was being taken care of for them nor did I want them to help; my labor was my gift to them.

As I packed up to leave after completing the best dam the new world had ever seen, I looked for some appreciation from the beavers and once again found no gratitude. Immediately after I finished blocking the great river, the beavers had seemed to forget that I was even there and carried on with their busy beaver ways without a pause.

When I was new to paradise, I made it a point to keep the hole at least out of sight from my tepee and deliberately built the thing a few hundred feet away and facing toward the east. The day I returned from building the dam, I turned it to the west. (My friends Shooshi and Takumat had taught me how to build my very own tepee in preparation for the real world. If I had known what the hell they were talking about, I would have asked about the jungle juice.)

One day I yelled into the hole as I was sure that I had heard voices, shouting my name. My only answer was the echo of a voice that had become unfamiliar to me.

I never wanted to see another animal again in my life. All of my good intentions to help the animal kingdom had gone unnoticed and unrewarded. The only difference my actions had made in the animal's behavior was a kingdom-wide dependency on me to perform every service I could provide for them. I gave purely cosmetic services such as grooming, gathering massive amounts of food, and allowing critters to use me as transportation as a man does a horse. I maintained the bridges and dams and sick animals that I had helped to build, to secure, or to nurture.

Everywhere I turned, there were sheep bleating for a brushing, dogs barking for a game of fetch, bears awaiting massages. When I would choose to ignore the animals, they would protest the lack of social services by surrounding me crying for more. I became a recluse and eventually retired my social services sack and contemplated throwing it into the hole, instead, I threw it in the thorn-less bushes.

The next day, Billy and I left the jungle for the blue mountains of the north. Billy was never far from my side and would respond to a perfected whistle (like everything I did, I was perfection). He would come running from whatever part of the jungle he was at to come to bear me to whatever destination I saw fit.

I reflected on my friendship with Billy as he bore me to my destination. I had noticed throughout my travels that of all of the creatures I had met in paradise that Billy was the only tyrannosaurus and was the most humanlike animal in the whole utopia. He was a one of a kind. He seemed to feel more than the other animals did, sometimes more than I felt. I could call him a true friend.

Much to Billy’s disliking and worry, I was to spend what felt like a year, though was most likely much longer looking back on it, climbing the largest mountain I had found during my adventures.

Billy and I had finally reached the base of the great mountain. Before I set off to climb the vast blue wonder, I summoned Billy to lower his head so that I could give him a kiss good-bye, for I did not intend to return from this last voyage. I told Billy that I planned on killing myself and thanked him for being such a good companion. He wagged his tail in excitement and gave me a big dinosaur kiss that again ended with a face plant in the mud. I was fairly certain that I could not die, but I thought I’d give it my best shot. I could tell by Billy’s excited reaction that he didn’t understand my meaning; he simply continued to wag his big blue and yellow spotted tail lovingly and seemed to smile with unconstrained affection.

All the way up the mountain, I could see a tiny blue blob at the base of where it stood, the little blue blip never moved during my entire climb.

At first there was a lot of hiking. Though it was a steep trek, the path I spent the first few months on was never entirely vertical. I never lost stamina or became sore; there was food everywhere, though I still needed no sustenance to live (you couldn’t find a square mile in paradise that wasn’t without food whatever the elevation). Something good that came from the climb was a song I wrote that reinvigorated my hopes to continue to be a songwriter. The song popped into my head from nowhere; it became an obsession to make every word perfect. I must have rewritten it as I hiked over a thousand times. Looking back, the lyrics were mediocre, and angst driven.

Toward the last month of the climb, it had finally become a climb. The walls were jagged and completely vertical. It was still warm, however; or if it was cold, I was unable to feel it. My untiring, unchanging muscles weren’t phased by the rock wall; it was just a matter of finding a place to lie down on occasion that was difficult. I didn’t feel a whole lot of anything physically. If I needed to rest, it was only ever mentally. Sleep was almost impossible, which only came to me once a year or so only after exhausting myself for days on end.

Finally, I reached the highest peak of the tallest mountain in the world. I looked out over creation and lamented over such beauty. I searched for any signs of ugliness in all of the blue-green, red, and gold beauty; but there was nothing but the misery of absolute delight to behold. The whole of everything I could see was positively perfect in every way. I wondered if the real world was round. 

It was time to relive the excitement of the crash that landed me in the jungle. I wanted to feel fear—the fear of losing things, the fear that makes you think you are real, the fear that makes one feel truly alive. I was starved for my heart to race. The last excitement I knew was the terror that sweet old Billy had inspired in me when I thought he was going to make me his dinner. I think that was the last time I laughed as well. I was terribly afraid of heights in the old world and thought maybe falling off a mountain would do the trick. I looked down and could not even see the base of the mountain past the clouds. I lost track of Billy ages before.

I jumped, and I fell for two days. The first ten minutes of the fall were invigorating, though my heart remained pumping at the same, unaltered tempo. I tried to simulate a fear for my life and couldn’t wait to see if I would be spared the perfection and invulnerability, I was positive I had been cursed with. The wind soared through my long shaggy hair and tickled my beard. I was mesmerized by the flat and spinning planet that I was racing to be reintroduced to.

Boredom set in after twenty minutes or so. “How long can I possibly keep falling.” I thought and also “I hope I die” as a sort of half a wish in my mind. 

My yearly sleep found me after a day’s fall.

I awoke to realize that I had not died and to Billy’s big purple tongue drenching me in messy mucus. I had landed safely on the ground, I was immortal, I was perfect, I was miserable. I could not even cry for that fact that I could not cry.

I returned from my fall and immediately moved my tepee directly next to the hole and made a bed right by it. 

“Who are you?” I shouted into the hole. “Where are you? Is that you, God?”

I waited eagerly.

“Yes,” said a deep ominous sounding voice

 “This is God, won’t you come to me my son? The voice seemed to echo forever.

It was true, I was unhappy, but I was also very cautious about this voice. I felt a warning looming within my guts, and I distrusted the voice inside my heart of hearts. Still, I was very curious. Curiosity for an old imperfect world I had left behind became my only happiness in paradise, that’s funny. I thought of Shooshi and Takumat. What would their advice be?

“My son...Come to me.”

While lying in a ditch with spiders crawling all over me that covered almost every inch of my body, I decided to start building a stage for the animals to enjoy the poetry I had come up and had also begun working on the concept for a one-man play. Building the stage took no time at all for me to complete. Time had a different meaning to me altogether.

I had become quite a carpenter living in the woods and helping shelter the animals; as a result, the stage was coming along very nicely. The building of a theatre and the labor involved to do so helped to steer my mind away from my discontent with paradise and away from the hole.

The day had finally arrived that I decided to gather all of the animals together in front of the stage so that they might take heed to my performance and so that I could culture them. The stage was still under development, and there were still various piles of lumber scattered across the stage. I could not wait to finish building it, and I badly wanted to try my hardest to present the art that I had made in paradise to all of my creatures. Billy helped to round all the animals on the continent up. Billy was a good shepherd, and all the animals listened to his commands.

Once I was satisfied with the untold number of animals that had gathered, I began to read, for I could not seem to muster the enthusiasm to sing.

Man’s made of love

With his eye on the prize

Man won’t give up

And man has God on his side

Man’s all grown up

And he’s doing it right

For man all he wants

Is peace on earth and of mind

Just then, a feral but friendly yellow dog in the audience keeled over and produced a litter of a dozen or so varicolored young pups. The animals in the proximity were deeply distracted over the sudden birth, some wandered to the scene and licked the new babes, and some gave a sniff. It was incredibly frustrating. Even when it seemed that I had caught the animal’s attention, they were actually deeply unmoved and easily distracted; no animal cheered, not even Billy, and no animal booed me. They were simply unaffected. I continued.

Man’s on his way

Man has been saved

Man’s never bored

And laughs when he is afraid

I was about to start the chorus and might have even sung it when a tiny pink and orange pot-belly pig bumped into my shin. It had apparently idiotically wandered onto the stage all by itself during my song. There was a time when I would have found the thing to be endearing, I thought as I stared back at its doting eyes. The pig’s little pink and black spotted tongue extended from its tiny mouth. The pig started to lick my leg. I turned the idiot around and kicked the thing in the ass and yelled “Git!” “Shoo!” The pig wandered back to the crowd, falling in once again with the other animals, only facing the opposite way of the performance, like so many of them. I rolled my eyes, sighed, and continued just barely finding the will to do so.

We’re so free

Victory

Everybody’s happy now

We made it!

A fly had begun to buzz noisily around my head; I ignored it and continued to the next verse.

Man’s not ashamed

Man’s proud and brave

And the animals know

It’s man who takes care of this place

Man’s goanna change

For better not worse

The future is his

Whatever he chooses will work

Man’s full of skills

And compassion is one

Man would feel guilt

If ever man could do wrong

One fly had turned into several, all seemingly dedicated to derailing the rest of my song and sabotaging my final performance. I grew to be angry and then livid by the ignorance of the flies. “They know exactly what they are doing and how important this is,” I thought. I convinced myself it was malice not stupidity that motivated them with all of my might, and with sheer livid anger in my voice, I read on.

We’re so free

Victory

Everybody’s happy now

We made it!

As the last words of my unimportant poem passed through my lips, a fly landed on them and began to rub his hands, then crapped. Afterward, the culprit continued to buzz around my face obnoxiously with its accomplices.

“That’s it!” I screamed. 

I was to the brim. I rationalized in my raging mind that one of the insurgents should pay for what their foolishness had ruined. I raised the clay tablet above my head and in a flash of malevolence struck the fly that had made my mouth a toilet and smote it for its insolence.

“You stupid goddamned animals, don’t you know genius when you hear it?” I cried.

I began chucking pieces of the unfinished stage aimlessly at the careless animals.

“I am your God! This is my world! You all belong to ME! You are all a bunch of wasteful idiots; I hate all of you and I hope you all die!” The only animals that seemed to be affected by my tantrum were the ones that got hit with bits of the wood that I was throwing and Billy, who let out a whimper when I accidentally struck him at the base of his mighty shin. Billy ran into the woods.

With blood boiling in my veins, I hobbled home ready to do the unthinkable. I approached the hole. There was a meaty hand with silver hair on the knuckles groping for a mate that stemmed from the dark void. Without another thought, I grabbed the hand and pulled.

The silver hand was attached to a small, rat-faced, sinister looking man, who brought with him another man, and another, and another, until there were at least thirty of them surrounding the hole, and no thanks to God, there were some women, very attractive women too.

At first, I was overwhelmed with excitement to see humans again but felt duped when God appeared to be absent in the crowd. I extended an arm to the person that the silver hand belonged to who also appeared to be the leader. The man was stout and short, with gray hair and an inexcusably evil look in his eye. Gottfried had a silver moustache and a snarling grin and looked like he would have been much fatter, older, and uglier in the place where he came from than he appeared to be in paradise. Everyone was immortal and in their mid-twenties in the paradise.

I smiled and said slowly, “My name is Jim.”

“God does not shake hands, bow to me swine!” was the first thing the half man’s ringing-bell voice said to me.

“I am Gottfried, this is my army, and this is our world now.” He shrieked in his pitchy squeak of a voice.

“There is plenty in this world for all of us my brothers and sisters.” I said, as I pulled a corned-beef-and-cabbage turnip from the warm breathing earth. The portion of man stomped up to me, grabbed the plant from my hand, and beat me on the head with it. The blow didn’t hurt at all, but I said “ouch!” anyway.

“Of courses there is.” Gottfried snarled. “There is plenty that needs to be conquered in this world too.”

I scratched my head. I couldn’t understand why this man would want to conquer paradise.

“Why does everything need to be conquered all of the time? Why can’t we all just share?” I pleaded.

The platoon erupted in laughter at Gottfried’s command. He raised his arms and the crowd became silent.

“What is your name, cur?” he asked.

“It’s Jim. I told you that.” 

“Tell me, Jim, if conquering the last world paid off and allowed me to live as a God in this new world, then why would I stop conquering all of the sudden? It is my duty to the bloodline to conquer this world, it is our duty!” the soldiers once again erupted. This time they were grunting and screaming their approval of what Gottfried had just said.

“My family and the families of the people you see around you ran the old world, and will do a fine job at running this one. We decided who the money went to and from where it came. It was our bloodline that chose which puppet to place on which throne and when. We were the keepers of the ancient crafts and secrets. Nothing happened by accident or without our approval. We were waiting for the signal that was made visible at the very second that the ancient Indian prophecies we protected foretold that it would. He quoted, “A great light from the darkness of the jungle that stretches to the heavens.” In unison with the other thirty-three Illuminati. I could hear the voice of God in the group. “If we had not conquered all, then we would have never had the knowledge to make it to our deserved paradise. This is the moment the bloodline has been working toward since the dark ages; it is time we are rewarded for our consistency and steadfastness. Changing our ways now, now that we claim our prize, is unthinkable. As I told you Jim, help us or get out of the way.” 

I answered lamely “You didn’t tell me that, and I will fight you.” 

They ignored me and got straight to their usurpation. I didn’t try to fight like I said I would. I could not stand for the conquering of paradise, but there was nothing one immortal could do against thirty souls that were equally cursed. The only option was to get out of the way and to try and sabotage them in secret.

For the first time since I had arrived in the real world, I felt I had a purpose and entertained again. Running around committing social services had finally become fulfilling, and the war that the Illuminati had brought to the new world was better than television. Time seemed to no longer drag as it did the more I scouted the world for the aftermath of the Illuminati's ruthless killing, which was always easy to find, and the more I slept with their women.

My enemy had rather quickly constructed a wooden, castle-like compound that they all lived in. I could tell by the angles of the walls of the fort and the sheer craftsmanship of it all that the Illuminati were all stone masons in the old world. They had even begun to construct a castle made of the white stone they had quarried from a smooth, dry rock wall that would feed water to the sea during the monsoon seasons. They had begun quarrying the stone immediately after their arrival in the real world. The castle was coming along very nicely; Gottfried was even occupying the one room they had completed already. It went without saying that I was banished from any of their places of living.

One day I was captured and I was held captive in a sophisticated dungeon that the Illuminati had discovered when it was just a shallow, blue cave that boor into a coastal cliff and peered out into the horizon from the precipice from a few hundred-thousand feet up and dangled high above the foamy sea. The view was far too breathtaking to be a dungeon, and the cave was very well lit. The place was already full of animals that were undergoing the controllers’ enhanced interrogation methods. Some were being messily dissected with sharpened stone knives, and others were being brutalized with rocks and logs. They all ended up the same kind of dead however.

I found myself tied to a chair and was fortunate enough to be tortured by Gottfried himself.

“I am going to break you Jim, but first I want to be your best friend. . .” Gottfried attempted to dig a hot knife into my gut with no affect. The rag in my mouth rendered me unable to laugh at his attempt to hurt me. His tone of voice became scornful and ever shriller.

“Are you hungry, Jim? I like take-out personally; I’ll have my men order us some, GUARDS!”

Two soldiers appeared saluting.

“Yes, sir!” the men answered instinctively.

“Bring Jim and myself some take-out, Chinese! And hurry!”

The men looked confused and scared.

“Sir?” one of the men asked.

“Just do it you idiots!  GET TO WORK!”

The men scurried away.

Gottfried began to sharpen his knife on a stone. 

“Do you like tofu, Jim?”

I made no sound or gesture to reply. Gottfried did not hesitate to jump onto my bound body with his knife in his hand; sitting on my lap, he held the blade to my throat. He brought his cheeky, mustachioed, rat face within centimeters of my cringing glower and then chuckled gaily.

“Good, I’m glad that you like tofu, Jim. We can be friends. Would you like me to flavor your tofu like you, Jim? Because I can, wouldn’t you like that, Jim? The food will be here soon, Jim, very soon. . . GUARDS!”

The room was empty.

Though I knew that there was a wall between us that neither time nor myself or he could destroy—was it something in this man’s psyche that would also never allow us to understand one another or mine? I’m sure that it was a little bit of both—I decided to pick his brain to see what made such evil and how it functioned. I thought to myself, “Obviously, this man is smart to have controlled so much of a world I could not let pass by, but what is it that makes him evil?” At the very same time I questioned myself, I thought, “What is it that makes me good? I feel that I am nicer or at least more even tempered than this person, but if I am good (I am still unsure whether I am or not, I think not) and still possess the same humanity that made this person a tyrant, then what is good?”

It was as if Gottfried was reading my thoughts. The topic of good and evil seemed to be mutually a prominent issue on both of our minds.

“Why the frown, Jim?” he asked sincerely.

“Should I turn your head upside down?”

While still sitting on my lap, Gottfried tugged at my head that did not move an inch. He waited one long minute that he spent staring at the stone roof and finally chuckled.

“I know why you are so unhappy hear in paradise, Jim. It is all really very, VERY (stab to the groin) SIMPLE!”

Somehow, the man had managed to make his breath stink like sulfur in a perfect world.

“It is your ideals that make you suffer so. I will tell you how the real world works Jim, though all of us, who know, know. I am the one who knows but does not pretend that the world has the potential to be a pretty place; do you know how hard it is, Jim? It is not easy to be a monster. . . at first; soon you will grow to like it. I did.”

Gottfried climbed off me and began to pace to and fro across the smoothed stone floor as he stabbed at both hands during and after every word he spoke. He started to skip as he continued.

“Though there were certainly political systems and forms of governance that were initially based on idealism—and some of these systems may have worked on a small scale or for brief instances, like the rice patties in the east that depended on both farmers and bureaucrats working in tandem and as equals—it was capitalism that reigned supreme for one simple reason. Do you know what the reason is, Jim?”

Gottfried came up behind me and started to push my chair toward the edge of the cave. My back was to the ocean as Gottfried continued to pace.

“Well, let me tell you, Jim! (Stab, stab, stab). It is simply this: when I wake up in the morning, all cozy and warm, I think to myself, “Man am I hungry.?” It is my hunger that I feel, and it is your hunger that you feel when you wake, no one else’s. Though I am in your mind evil and you are in your mind good, we share the same unalterable appetite that makes us selfish. Listen to me when I say to you Jim that it will not be until man learns to protect his own ideals as he does his own food that any sort of world based on idealism will ever work. The world can take from you your ambitions but never your hunger, and as long as appetites dictate us, then it is profitable to dictate our appetites.”

“What a fool!” I thought. I had already shown him all of the endless amounts of food and nourishment this new world had to offer, and he still believed that man could only function in an appetitive state of mind. I wondered how he could not see just how far beyond hunger we had journeyed and how we were so lucky to be there.

Gottfried yanked the moist rag from my mouth and—very much like a therapist —asked me how the day’s events made me feel and what I thought about it all. Though I knew that by keeping silent I could steal the man’s thunder, my ideals let my thoughts be heard.

“But don’t you see Gottfried, we don’t have to protect our food anymore. The only thing we can lose in this new world are our ideals. There is plenty for everyone, DON’T YOU SEE?” Tears haunted my eyes but were never made real.

Gottfried smiled when I shouted. I could see it was the reaction he was fishing for. I felt slightly defeated.

“Yes Jim, I do see. I see it all, but they don’t. They don’t see, Jim. And until they do, comfort is a privilege and food is scarce.”

I nodded and smiled, while trying to turn my head upside down. Gottfried clapped and said while laughing,“That’s the spirit, Jim!”

At first the man focused on trying to hurt me physically in any way he could though he knew that he could not inflict any lasting damage onto me. As the guards returned to the room, Gottfried threw at me a made-of-earth gillie suit that all of the Illuminati wore as uniforms. He asked me to join his army nicely. I could see how hard this was for him. I laughed for a good minute. Gottfried untied my hands so that I could examine the suit he threw at me. I was able to get a knee slap in to add to my laughter before he hastily tied my arms back behind the chair

“Do your worst” I yelled at the tiny man, and then I said “Fuck you!”

A guard untied me from the torture chair and walked me to the edge of the cave that over looked the raucous sea and pushed.

A few days passed after I washed ashore, I decided to take to the jungle once more to recover my social services sack, and to find my dear friend Billy.

I followed the trail of dead and dying animals that lead all over creation. The road of carnage took me on a few days journey that ended me back in my jungle. The helpless animals had no instincts to prepare for predators, not even the fiercest looking and gigantic animals. Not even poor Billy.

After recovering my social services sack, I worked every hour of every day to try to help the animals find refuge from the carnage, or I would at least try to ease their pain as they died in vain.  That day, the day I arrived in the jungle, I came upon a group of ten Illuminati who were all lead by Gottfried. They had become aware of Billy apparently and, like me, were tracking him.

I overheard the conversation the men were having. As I listened, I thought I felt the blood drain from my body and began to worry for Billy’s safety.

“Where’s that damn T-rex gone to?” said the tall dark-haired man with the voice of God from the back of the squad.

“He’s close; I can feel the ground shaking,” Said a long slender man with a beard and very pale skin. 

Gottfried with his ear to the patchy jungle floor. He went on to say after standing up and rejoining the group,

 “We’ve got to make an example out of it. If we kill the fiercest creature in the jungle, it will surely strike fear into the rest of the hearts of the animal kingdom.”

Gottfried pounded on his shield and declared, “Were eating dinosaur tonight, fellas!”

The squad followed his example and banged their shields cheering for their leader.

Gottfried, after a few feeble attempts at reading and assessing the dinosaur prints, licked his pointer finger, then raising it above his head in the wind, lost his temper.

“To hell with it, *Weeee-ooo-Weeeeep*” Gottfried pursed his lips and whistled. He was a fuming impatient man and a bad hunter.

“Boom, boom, boom, boom,” the sound was nearing.

Gottfried depressed his pencil lips with the sausage pointer finger of his right hand.

“Shhh! Here it comes. Give me an arrow,” demanded Gottfried as he snapped his fingers.

 Someone handed their leader an arrow. Billy’s big head appeared from the dense wilderness. As the rest of Billy’s body could be seen, Gottfried bent to a low squat and readied an arrow against the tense waiting fibers of his bow for release.

I ran like hell through the jungle, screaming, “Nooooo, Billy, noooooo! They are bad. BAAAD, Billy, BAD. Go home, Billy, go home, you big stupid animal! Go home! PEOPLE ARE BAD, BILLY.”

Billy was running full force to meet and to lick his new friends when suddenly an arrow pierced the beast’s heart.

“NOOO, BILLY! PLEASE, GOD, NO. YOU MONSTERS! YOU MONSTERS! GOD!” 

I felt that I would die if I could not cry and mourn my beloved companion. The tears will come, I thought.

When I finally made it to Billy, I found him lying on his side, with his boulder eyes staring at mine. Billy’s dry purple tongue hung out the side of his mouth, as was his fashion. Billy gasped for air. I stroked the animal’s dumb, sweet head. Poor Billy groaned in agony. I whispered in his ear, “I’m sorry Billy. I’m so sorry Billy.” His breaths became quick, sharp, and short. Billy gave one last attempt to give me a dinosaur kiss. No tears came when Billy’s parched, pebbly tongue limply scraped across my face for one last time. With a loud moan, Billy was gone.

The tragic scene was pure bliss for Gottfried and quenched all of his thirst for blood and misery. The man began to dance and skip around the shady jungle floor. Gottfried had the most disturbing laugh I had ever heard in my life. It seemed that he was coming and making a mess within his gillie suit.

“Aaa-aaa-aaaa-hah-aaaaa-haaaa-aaaaaaa-aaa-a-a-a-aaa-haa.”

Gottfried drifted arrogantly to Billy’s big blue corpse and kicked it, laughing perversely.

“Take the son a bitch’s head off. I want this half of you to bring it back to the fort and I want this half of you to capture Jim. My mantle place needs trophies. Didn’t you idiots hear me? AFTER HIM!”