The Vulture

Not even the strongest generic pharmaceutical gap-filling cement could have kept his torso from the armpits up from remaining detached after thirty-five hours in surgery; that lump of metal, the incidental shell, hurled at forty-five degrees away from where the party was really at, had a party of its own. Sparing him the usual indignity, Jim’s bowels emptied up through a gap near where his left lung, gripped plaintive and instantaneously by the shoulders and head, might otherwise have been, had fate had it differently. Fate’s a funny thing; were Dr Rudolph not in that particular village at that particular time, surgery would most likely never have been considered an option. Circumstance (secular fate), however, had it that Dr Rudolph was in the boudoir of some local yokel whose wife was in the throes of “stress-induced anal distension”, as diagnosed. Trepanning and Hippocratic semen were intrinsic to the cure (notes on that case are smudged at best and cogent at worst; besides, that’s a tangent, and reports such as this will be tainted with nothing of the sort).

Jim was in a horrendous state when the nearest Fraulein reached his sodden dying patch of ground; it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise to those present at any point in the affair had they been told that fragments of bone and other bodily shrapnel had been flung as far even as the battlefield. Nobody was in any position, however, to tell them anything of the sort, or otherwise.