“Meat. It’s good for you.”

-An ad somewhere

Micha Ostor weighed about 66 kilograms, with all limbs accounted. He stood at about 183.45 centimeters, after all of the hair on his head was shaved off. His eyes were blue-green, purple-red, and orange-black respectively, and his tongue, given his starvation, was surprisingly red and still flush with blood. The butcher assigned for the godling’s dismantling had a cold and didn’t really feel like handling such tough meat so early in the morning, but his boss didn’t want to hear any of it.

“Hello, my name’s Stevening Sayers and I’ll be your butcher for today.” The butcher abruptly decided to introduce himself to Micha, who could do nothing except tremble in fear. “We’ve run a check on you beforehand and no one upstairs are looking for you, and hopefully if someone was, you’ll be long gone from here and out of our hands. Now to begin, I like to give my meat the opportunity of choosing where my first cut is going to go.”

“Stevening, what the fuck are you doing? Get back to work!” Stevening Sayers’s boss, an uppity and heavily pregnant wasp spat at him. The butcher nodded submissively at the insect, but mocked her the moment she turned her attention somewhere else.

“You didn’t hear it from me, but I heard she got knocked up by a pretend-wasp. Didn’t even have a stinger, just a plastic prop duct-taped to the tail. No one’s stupid enough to say it to her face though, because, duh.” Stevening motioned to the stinger at the end of his boss’ rear that looked more at home at the hip of a pirate.

"That reminds me of a pretty story I heard when I was a kid. It goes like this …”

So there was a kid, and he lived in a really good place, real fancy and nice, and everything’s proper, right? And his parents are also right and proper, and they got these ‘expectations’, right, and they’re very high, because they live in a posh place and all that. And this kid tried really hard, did his best really, and it’s all well and good until he turned ten and entered 4th grade.

Out of nowhere, he starts failing hard. Like dropping a pig off a cliff hard, y’know, and not the ones with wings. He couldn’t catch up somehow, not even to the stupidest lout in his class called Kenny, and Kenny here thought two was a color. Don’t ask me why Kenny was in this kid’s class, I don’t know. Maybe Kenny’s parents are loaded? You’re welcome to guess.

Anyway, once the kid saw Kenny running circles around him, he became a bit mental. Okay, very mental, but the kid’s used to pressure. Lived with it his whole life, except he had absolutely no skin when it came to disappointing people. It was his greatest nightmare, and when he came home one day and saw his parents just look at him with that ‘look’, he wanted to just die right then and there.

That night, he couldn’t sleep a wink. He kept replaying what he saw over and over again, the details of his parents’ face becoming exaggerated with each replay, until they were practically shouting and towering over the kid, screaming and frothing at the mouth like a couple of rabid wombats. It was all in his head, and truthfully, his parents were more concerned than mad at him, but the kid didn’t see it that way. He felt trapped, and when an animal feels trapped, they either stand their ground and fight to the death, or run, run, and run until they can’t run no more.

And the kid chose to run that night. He slipped out the window and almost broke his neck climbing down the side of the house, not even bothering to put on a jacket or anything to keep out the cold. He did make the smart choice of bringing his shoes with him, but without socks, he might as well bought a ticket to frosbite city for his toes. And he felt that mistake the farther away he walked, but the heart is a stubborn fool, and so the kid kept on walking until he found himself lost.

How can a kid get lost in paradise, you might ask? Well, it starts with the wrong right turn and a left turn that kept going and going until suddenly, the kid found himself in a field with absolutely no trace of home in it. What it had though, were three ogres of differing sizes and three boulders of varying height. And as luck would have it, the kid found them while they were deep in sleep, with just about nothing that could wake them short of thunder.

And that’s when the storm rolled in

“…And just like that, we have our first bone.” Stevening said proudly as he held aloft a finger bone, showing Micha Ostor a rare glimpse into the inner workings of his own body. The godling felt a strange mix of curiosity and horror seep into his mind, as the shifting mass on the butcher’s hand threatened to roll off and slip into the drains below. The display went only a moment longer before the butcher set aside the small piece and put it into a kind of suspension in a small jar, sealing it before facing his work once more.

“I want to go at this slow today. Hence, the lack of pain. I know, you hear about getting butchered and cut into pieces and you think of guts and blood and cleavers. And you’d be right for butchering anything that’s not a deity.” Stevening turned around and looked at a tray filled with various tools of his trade. He picked up a syringe filled with an orange-tinted, clear liquid with what appeared to be tiny cubes suspended in it. With a practiced flick, the butcher snapped off the syringe’s needle and sprayed the contents into his waiting mouth, his face starting to grin as whatever was inside started to take hold.

“NOW, I THINK WE SHOULD MOVE TO THE HEART NEXT.” Stevening’s sudden rise in volume alarmed Micha Ostor, but it was too late. “LET’S CONTINUE WHERE WE LEFT OFF, SHALL WE?”

The first one struck far away, the light way ahead of the eventual rumble. Then the second came from behind the kid, cleaving a tree in half and setting the stage for a wildfire, were it not for the pouring rain. The wind wanted the kid to fly, and it took all his strength to resist them, his heart beating louder than the gales themselves. But all sound paled to the roar of ogres, pulling apart their rocky blankets and grassy beds to enact that all too familiar ritual of waking up. One opened its mouth wide and drank the rainwater eagerly, followed suit by its brethren.

“Awake! Awake? Blast it!” The ogre with a tail as thick as his own thighs bellowed. “You said this place never rains! It’s raining right now and I’m soaking wet all the way to my nethers!”

“I didn’t say that!” An ogre with fists bigger than his head shouted back. “I said, ‘It rarely rains here.’ Don’t go twisting my words just because you’re upset! I’m soaking wet too!”

“Brothers, please be quiet.” The last ogre spoke up with surprising eloquence, given the massive tusks that curved up and out of his mouth. ”You know the rules for when we wake up. Pick up your stone.” The other two ogres groaned after hearing this, but with as much reluctance as they could muster, they picked themselves up properly and grabbed the boulders that were right in front of them. They huffed and puffed and with mighty roars, pried the stony monuments from their roots and saddled them across their shoulders, their actions replicated by the last ogre with less fanfare. With slow, earth-grinding steps, the ogres began to leave the field, but stopped when-

“Wait!” The kid, frozen before by equal parts shock, awe, and fear, now spoke up with curiosity burning in his heart. “Can I come with you?!” This question, by some miracle, were not drowned out by neither the rain nor gale, and the ogre with impressive fists caught wind of the kid’s voice, and stopped his and his brethren’s march with a snap of his fingers.

“What is it now?” The Tusked Ogre looked back with clear irritation on his face.

“I, I think I just heard a kid’s voice. A human kid’s voice.” The ogre of the hour said with trepidation. “How long have we been sleeping again?”

“Hey, ogres!” The kid shouted again once he was closer to the rock-carrying monsters. “Can you please take me with you?! Please!”

“Hey, there it is again. Did you hear it?” The Gloved Ogre shifted his back and carefully put down his stone, looking around with his hands cupped around his ears to try and find the source of the mystery voice. “Please tell me you two can hear that too.”

“I can.” The Tusked Ogre growled as he too put down his rock. “And I don’t like hearing it right now, especially with this storm coming in. It could be a trap like last time.”

“Last time wasn’t really a trap. We just weren’t really paying attention because we were so full.” The Tailed Ogre chimed in as he let his stone smoothly roll off his back and tail. “I don’t regret it though. I love revisiting that time in my dreams.”

“Hello?! Can you hear me, Ogres?! I said I want to run away with you!” The kid shouted one more time at a distance no one could have ignored. “Can we please go to your cave or something?! It’s freezing out here!”

“Oh, hey, there’s the kid.” The Gloved Ogre spotted the shivering mess only a step away from them, and indeed with one step, the kid found himself surrounded on all sides by the trio. The only silver lining was the reduction of wind and rain that came his way, and the heat that came off the ogres were enough to bring life back to the kid’s body.

“Hello.” The kid greeted with a suddenly quieting voice. “Can I come with you wherever you’re going? I’m running away from home.”

“Why?” The Gloved Ogre asked.

“Yeah, why should we let you follow us?” The Tailed Ogre followed suit with his own question.

“No, I mean why are you running away? Human kids don’t do that for no reason, usually. Do you have a reason?” The Gloved Ogre tilted his head at the kid. “Did your parents hurt you?”

“Yes.” Micha spoke soft as a whisper as Stevening removed the godling’s fourth rib. At the rate the butchering went, there would soon be hardly anything left from the neck down. In a wat, perhaps this was what Micha Ostor was always going to be; spare parts for someone else’ odds and ends. The godling closed his eyes and prayed soon that it will soon end.

“Well, good night.” The butcher swung down once, then twice, then thrice. His cuts did their job, as Micha Ostor faded into his components; the crystallized orb of his soul, the withering yet persisting curse that even now sought a new victim to claim, and the gel-like shifting masses of Godflesh threatening to spill out and lie wasted on the greasy floor.

“Job’s done. Take these away.” Stevening said as he made his way out onto the break room, leaving the skeleton crew embedded into the walls to come alive and knit together to form one disgruntled bone monster. The empty sockets dotted upon its body gazed on the mess the butcher had left behind, and made a disapproving clack even as it considered the items laid out on the table.

With a flurry of bone snaps, Micha Ostor’s soul was swiftly teleported to the Soul Vault, where it will remain until such time that a deity or its like takes fancy upon the godling and resurrects them back whole as the day they were made. The bone monster avoided the curse entirely, resolving to ignore it in favor of the more pleasant task of assessing and trying out a little bit of the Godflesh upon its old bones.

It was a quiet day in the Retribution Fields, for once.