Herman the Fool – Short Version

“I’ll take it,” Sandra sighed at the cash register.

“No problem. Just make sure you take care of Herman when he comes home with you. He always takes up too much space.”

“Well, the little fellow does seem small for that.”

Easing away from the doll store counter, Sandra pushed herself out the door, as she weighed over 300 pounds. She now had a new friend for her collection, heading to her apartment downtown. She could not be a lesbian any longer. She was too old and fat – it had mattered - to keep her previous lover. And she knew she had to die. Her soul had gone out the window and simply never returned. But her own body groaned and creaked as she made it go up the stairs after she keyed into her small but dingy apartment building.

She made it up the steps to the top floor where she was forced to live. It had taken a long time to find the small studio apartment, far away from the boyfriend who had always made fun of her, in an occasionally funny way. He had been an actual man, before the lesbian – being a short, doll-like dude himself, not much unlike Sandra’s father, who had died recently. She gazed longingly at the dummy, as though expecting a mystery event. But she smiled her own smile as she held back against the frequent, insipidly small heart attacks. They were bursting her proud and imprisoned chest out, as she was holding her 1,000th Pierrot doll!

For you see, her apartment was stuffed with the Crying Clown, the smiling clown, the clown everywhere. She had built several levels of wooden shelves from kits. These were her only children. But as she gazed at her new doll Herman, she could swear she saw a worried look cross his painted face. He was worried, the little Herman, for her! She struck him. Then she shook him harder and harder.

“Say you’re sorry. Say you’re sorry, Daddy, for telling me there is an afterlife, and that you were God!” Suddenly, Sandra noticed that Herman’s little rouge-red mouth was cracked. Ouch! “Daddy,” she murmured; “Daddy, you are broken. Come to me…to my permanent home,” she intoned as the melodious…Mommy.

She placed Herman neatly on a shelf. As she looked around, the place resounded with marching band dolls, sophisticated dolls, Barbie dolls, kewpie dolls with their little blond heads, Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls stuffed with candy hearts as she had sewn them in, plastic dolls made by anyone whatsoever, purple and green ceramic dolls and some which were merely other kinds of clown dolls. The camera that was her eyes refocused on her brain. Something had been in there long ago, recording anything as she slumped to the floor, falling into her fat, having whittled down deep under it into the skinniest person. She was smiling at me, thought Herman as he rudely awakened. Now I am home at last, I hope, he thought to himself. Freeing himself from her death-like grasp, he hopped up and immediately walked over to her body.

“Godspeed, but I don’t know where you went. You have probably disintegrated. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I would say. Yet somehow, I would have liked to get to know you, my sweetheart, my…” Herman stopped. He gulped, and realized the worst fate had befallen him. This could not be Heaven.

“Hello!”

There was absolutely nothing left but dead silence.

Many doors slammed downstairs to let little him know this: that he had only his survival urge and his urge to have fun somehow left. There was no little boy with whom to play; there was no errant ear in which to fathom the obscurity called time. He even tried mounting her, but there was nothing there. As it grew colder inside, over the years, he groped in boring devotion to the nonexistent dead woman. But he was unable to do anything to bring her back alive. Bugs, weasels, cockroaches, mildew and tiny spirochetes: all ate him. Finally, he just keeled over, lying still in perfectly stately patience. And the gods were not there to pronounce his ultimate fate.

Who are those gods? Why, they are no one, nothing at all.