Reasons Not to Wake up a Sleeping Beggar Early in the Morning

By Marcelo Medone

The homeless man woke up, startled by the blow to his ribs, and sat up on his bed of rags, cardboard, and old newspapers.

"Hey, brother! What's going on?" he yelled.

A uniformed policeman was standing next to him.

"The next time I find you sleeping at the bank door, I'll hit you with a metal bar instead of my shoe," the policeman told him.

It was early in the morning and there were hardly any people on the street, probably because of the intense winter cold. But soon the banking area would start to get busy.

The beggar began slowly to collect his few belongings, mumbling unintelligible insults to himself.

The uniformed man lost patience and kicked him again, this time in the rear, causing the homeless man to land on his teeth.

"Go! Get out of here, human scum!" the policeman exclaimed irritably.

"Damn cop!" the other muttered, running his grimy hand over the bleeding cut on his lower lip.

Guttural grunts came from a cardboard box amid the rags.

"What have you got there?"

"Nothing that concerns you."

This time the box shook convulsively and the growls broke out again.

"You better show me," the policeman insisted.

"As you wish, Your Honor."

The man smiled through his sparse-toothed mouth, spat out some blood, opened the box, and motioned for the other to come closer. The policeman leaned over to look and immediately a part crab, part tentaculated mollusk and part ape with mastiff fangs jumped out and clung to his face, suffocating him and starting to bore its way through his face.

The policeman fell to his knees in a rattle of pain and tried to tear off the attacking beast, but to no avail. You could hear the crunching of the bones of the face and the noise of the skin, muscles and blood being sucked. The creature swelled like a monstrous tick to triple its original volume as it continued its heinous feeding orgy.

The beggar, who had not been the least bit shaken by the attack, raised a nearby manhole cover and whistled. Immediately a multitude of chimerical beasts began to sprout, some hairy centipedes with multiple jaws, others similar to winged worms with multiple digestive suckers and others resembling miniature vultures and hyenas.

Wasting no time, the creatures pounced on the remains of the uniformed man, vying fiercely with each other for a place in the carnage. In a demonstration of scavenging efficiency, they crushed, chewed, and sucked every little piece of human flesh, bone, and hair, even clothing, regardless of whether the material was cloth, leather, metal, or wood.

Soon there was nothing left but a pool of blood mixed with digestive juices and drool on the sidewalk.

The hobo lovingly took his bloated pet and put it back in the box not without difficulty given its increased size; the other beasts fled down the sewer as quickly as they had come.

The man replaced the manhole cover and stood up defiantly on the sidewalk, as if guarding his personal place in the world. Two or three passers-by filed past him, their gaze fixed on the horizon. If any of them saw anything, they were careful not to interfere.

The beggar then turned, unzipped his worn-out trousers and extracted his genitals. Whistling a triumphant melody, directing his member with his hand, he washed the blood from the tiles in spurts of urine, forming a pink stream that rushed down the sewer, from which a choir of shrieks erupted.

Then, unhurriedly, the vagrant put away his private parts, yawned, and returned to his bed of rags and newspapers. He still had an hour before the bank opened.