They came unarmed. And they didn’t have legs or heads, neither. They were torsos, and God only knows where they came from.
People have their various theories, naturally, some plausible, some not so much. There’s a group that maintains all the torsos can be traced back to one original ur-torso, a product of some gruesome murder at a highway rest stop outside of Chattanooga. The story holds that some lunatic cornered a lone woman, killed her, then chopped off all her appendages and lopped off her head, leaving the torso in an outdoor garbage can. The next thing that happened, if you buy into this particular theory, was that the torso, which was still twitching and writhing with the instinct of self-defense even after being tossed away, very much like a headless chicken, managed to knock over the trash can by slamming itself against the sides, then slithered along the interstate, out for mindless revenge. What this hypothesis leaves uncovered, of course, is how the damn thing multiplied. It’s possible some desperate truck driver found it undulating by the side of the road, did the unspeakable, and then the whole mad army grew from there.
Other people simply think the torsos are the next step in human evolution. This may seem contradictory to common sense, because you’d think the human race would want more arms and legs, not less. Then again, maybe there’s something to be said about our unacknowledged desire to go back to something simpler, to concentrate on our more primal needs, to not have to worry about picking up our keys so we can get from one appointment to the next. Torsos don’t have to think. They don’t worry. They’re all heart and soul, and no mental activity, so who knows? Maybe they are more highly evolved than the rest of us who still drag our appendages around, day by day.
Still other people, religious types mostly, see the torsos as a plague sent to punish us for our materialism or some other multitude of sins. It probably doesn’t matter where they came from. What matters is that, plague or not, these torsos are clearly hell-bent on wiping the rest of us out.
Despite their apocalyptic intentions, it’s awfully hard for a torso to kill anyone. Smothering is their only method of attack, and they aren’t very adept at getting themselves into a good position to be able to do that. Still, it’s pretty unnerving when a torso manages to get into your house, and you hear its labored skittering along the hardwood floors in the hall, and then you catch its lumpy shadow on your bedroom wall. At this point, the torso reaches what’s mostly a dead end, as it has no real way of pulling itself up onto your bed. Even so, it’s tough to get a good night’s sleep when you can hear the thing continually convulsing, tensing its shoulder blades and glutes in a way that allows it the slightest hop, as it tries to latch itself onto your bedskirt over and over and over in the dark.
There have been some scattered successes for the torsos in this regard, mostly involving people who didn’t have bed frames and slept on mattresses right on the floor. And then there was the gruesome massacre at that slumber party with all those toddlers in sleeping bags.
But as long as you take basic precautions such as covering your chimney and latching the doggie door, the torsos are unlikely to get you. Even if they can’t kill you, however, the torsos can still prove quite the nuisance. For one thing, they’re all over the place. You’re bound to run over five or six of them on your way to work, even if you only have a ten minute commute. One of the biggest problems with the torsos is the fact that they keep multiplying. Even though they’re missing most of their limbs, they still have the parts that count, so it’s not uncommon to open your front door in the morning to find a couple of torsos going at it on your welcome mat like a set of novelty chattering dentures. Everywhere you look, there are more and more tiny baby torsos, which can be even more burdensome than their adult counterparts, considering the little nooks and crannies they’re able to wedge themselves into, such as your shoe or the toilet drain.
Generally, humankind seems pretty confident we’ll win our war against the torsos. All the major cities have formed impromptu burning yards where torsos are hauled by the truckload and tossed onto the fire, where they writhe and shake as their skin melts off, which is less horrifying than it sounds because they can’t scream. They’ve created jobs, since the local governments have hired workers to go around and scoop the torsos into bags. Some people have even made a game of herding the torsos onto soccer fields and kicking them into netted goals. Most of our optimism comes from the fact that the torsos can’t get any smarter, no matter how mad they get and how hard they fight.
Call it a cautionary tale if you want. Feel free to make some analogy between the brainless torsos and some of the stupider things human beings have done, to adopt a tone of smug superiority and say, “There but for the grace of our arms, legs, and heads go we.” That’s fine. Just don’t overlook the fact that the torsos want something, and they act with unchecked desire, an unmitigated passion that those of us who think of ourselves as fully human will never know, what with our nuances and second thoughts. The torsos want to live. And they want you dead.
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Kevin Drzakowski teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. His plays have been performed around the Midwest and in New York City, and his poetry and prose have been published
in journals such as The Offbeat, Spectrum, Verse Wisconsin, and The Wisconsin Review.
