THE KINGDOM OF MY LEFT FOOT

The little people who live on my left foot have gone to war, marching legions up my left leg to claim the calflands and the hinterland that is my thigh. It’s amusing, really, that such tiny beings are in such need of living space and quite so vicious in obtaining it.

I watched with interest as they dispatched expeditions to explore my right leg and stomach, discovering other nations as mighty and adventurous as their own. Naturally, further wars ensued, one after another, as they struggled for domination, borders surging up and down my body.

As always, conflict stimulated innovation and they advanced from weapon to weapon, inventing new and ingenious ways to kill one another through a further series of wars and revolutions until I could feel the sharp pinprick jabs as they carpet-bombed each others’ nations.

Then, one night, I woke with a start to a sudden burning pain, as if someone had just stubbed a cigarette out on my thigh. I yelped and looked down to see a tiny mushroom cloud arising from my flesh: They had reached the nuclear age! There was going to be a scar and it stung for some time.

As in our world, where one state developed the nuclear bomb, others followed, creating parity that led to a certain sort of precarious peace.

Things quietened down after that, just the occasional minor skirmish and proxy wars fought between the tiny statelets in the vicinity of my hips. That was good; I could do without the distraction of their squabbling. After all, I have a life of my own to live.

Only... the carefully-maintained balance seems to be tilting. Their arguments and threats grow more shrill and war seems almost inevitable. The only thing keeping the peace is Mutually-Assured Destruction. MAD: It certainly is! If they go to war now, they’ll destroy each other along with their whole world: The only problem is, that’s me!

DJ Tyrer has plenty of those issues that, while tedious in a brief bio such as this, are greedily devoured when they appear in ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies, is the person behind Atlantean Publishing (which has been going for two decades), was placed second in the 2015 Data Dump Award for Genre Poetry, and was short-listed for the 2015 Carillon 'Let's Be Absurd' Fiction Competition, which was absurd. DJ Tyrer's website is at https://djtyrer.blogspot.co.uk/

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