Vladmir Glistok, or Vliddy the Glik as his sideshow mates and ghoul buddies call him, has his birthday party on a wet, runny nose of a night. The swimming, saturated air pregnant with rain, the milky sky bloated with budding clouds, the guests arrive in slick and dripping black garments of shiny shark flesh and briny eel skin. Clowns laugh and jesters sway. There is hollow joy, stark madness, and ripping mirth...for this is a party, after all.

And in the secret withering world of the carnival, birthdays are special things.

Blowouts, wheezing, gasping, funny-faced, big-bellied galas of discordant excess. For when nature has stripped normality from you and offered instead an extra limb or two or none at all, you are entitled to a certain excess.

In Vliddy's flapping rain-kissed tent in his little neighborhood in his little tent city smack dab in the seething core of his little world, it's all good globby cheer, pearly teeth, feasting eye, and growling belly. For this is the great grand festival of gorging gluttony. That day when good three-armed dwarves like Vliddy the Glik let their hair down, roll their saturnine eyes back, let their trousers fall, unbutton their boisterous bulges, and let the savage, hyena-faced chewer out of its rattling, reeking, rusty cage. Good and merry fun. Good for the soul and myriad wasting cancers therein. On your birthday, the beast can show its ragged teeth and lapping tongue and a boy can be a thing of hunger, a vampire of sensation.

So, around seven, his friends arrive in a slavering wolf pack from their own tents and trailers. First in comes old buddy Boris the Geezer followed by Ernie "Flaming Butt" Frazak and Lenny the Listless who is so emaciated he is the spitting charnel image of his father, The Living Skeleton. Next we see good, jolly friend Nips with his mouthful of fangs and hateful Langely One-Eye and greasy Johnny Fats and Bubba "Snake-Limbs" Klorst. Squeezing through the sighing door on their muddy heels is giggling Chucko the De-Veiner and his illegitimate legally insane half-brother Francais "Freako the Twister and Swayer" Fripp fresh from the dusty bowels of his locked cage which he shares with his father, the Wild Man from Borneo and the clanking chains therein. The brothers Gleer come next, the finest and fattest Siamese twins Vliddy's ever known. Last, but certainly not least, are Rex, Bela, Porska, Reggie the Bald, and Erik the Clawer with his two-headed cat Radu. There are others, of course--for what would a midway birthday be without the cannibal hordes?

It should be said that Otto "the Octopus Boy" Olendorf will not be joining the festivities. On a dare from none other that Vliddy the Glik, that terror of the midway, poor invertebrate Otto climbed atop the Ferris wheel on a stormy night of black satin wind and forking lightening and was duly struck by whizzing ball of electricity. He can now be found on lurid display—and quite tastelessly—in a vacuum-sealed jar in the Gallery of Boneless Horrors. Good-bye, Otto, Old friend and sideshow attraction. Good-bye, old buddy and pal.

Anyway, Vliddy’s chums and goodfellas bustling about like ants in a rotting dog's skull, Vliddy climbs atop the broad shoulders of Herman "Axe-Torso" Hozier and screams, "Let the games begin!" in a very Roman howl—one his father/mother, the Sexual Mystery and carnie barker, would be proud of.

About this time that which makes a carnival birthday party the most gut-awful and grotesque gala of the year comes to pass: the food is served. Sweet Lord of Treats and Decayed Teeth, what a sight. The smell, the taste...luxury. Platters, bowls, plates, goblets, trays, finger-cups. Steaming roast cave-pig. Carved rack of dog. Filet of nun. Virgin lambs’ eye in rich kidney sauce. Poached delicate toad in sweet fish bile. Tender giblet of water beetle in a fine soup of vermin gum. Ecstasy. The hordes dig in, stripped of clothing and etiquette, headhunters in a convent. They bite, tear, chew, chomp, and rend. They gorge and disgorge. Fill their tight bellies and empty them again to the floor with pagan relish.

Then come the games. Vliddy and the hordes play "Maim the Junky" and "Decapitated Mannequin", "Cadaver, Cadaver, who’s the Cadaver?" and Vliddy's special favorite, "Hide the Needle". It's a blast, a right and randy exercise in debauchery and barbarian custom. Vliddy wins at "Hide the Needle", of course. He always does. The object is to turn out the lights so not a sliver of illumination is visible. There upon, the one who’s "it" must insert the needle in some secret place and allow the others to institute a violent body search in order to find it. Snake-Limbs and Lenny the Listless didn't do bad--the former slid the needle under his thumbnail and the latter in his ear cartilage. Not uninspired, Vliddy decided. The Eyeless Wonder did the worst, hiding the needle in his moppy hair. He didn’t care for the game much since the last time when he’d won and secured his station in the sideshow at the same time. But it was Vliddy who triumphed, inserting the needle in his left nostril and concealing it in the soft meat there. It took the others some time to locate it. Only following a thorough body cavity search were they successful.

The last stage of the party, of course, were the presents.

Vliddy wasn’t certain as to whether he’d get gifts or not. For the truth be told, Vliddy was a bad boy. He wasn’t fair, all knew, nor truly kind or considerate of his mates. A good example would be slice poker. Vliddy was exceptionally talented at this; he never lost and had a black box of severed fingers to prove it, hidden away amongst his boastful collection of stuffed toads and rusty surgical knives. But there was one occasion when he did lose. When it came time to slice off his own index finger, Vliddy welshed and rubbed sand in his opponents eyes. Not nice, this. And there were countless other examples. Vliddy stole lunch money. He was the one who’d poured rat poison into poor Mr. Neeb’s—The Flame-Eater--java. He’d purloined little Tomzak Mintz' collection of jungle leeches and had, wearing a hood, blinded Trina "The Lizard Girl" Zin after tying her down and burning her eyes with cigarettes.

So, yes, he wasn’t a good boy, that Vliddy.

And no one has forgotten the night he melted the Wax Witch in her own cauldron or sewed up living snakes in the Fat Lady’s belly and fed her a steady diet of rats.

So Vliddy was a bad boy, a parasitic little monster with carrion eyes and a reptile's black and hungering brain. So imagine Vliddy when all his pals handed him a present wrapped in the finest newborn skin and stitched up tight as a dead man’s belly with cat sinew. He tore it open and there was a knife inside.

But not just any.

This was the tool of a master butcher. A fine bone-handled sacrificial dagger set with jewels and pins. Something designed to bisect meat with razored indifference, to illicit scream and shrieking sorrow. An instrument of precision atrocity only given to those you hold a great and dire respect for. It was the brothers Gleer and Erik the Clawer who came up with the great and giddy idea of killing Vliddy. Erik stabbed him in the dreaming pods of his eyes, then in the soft recesses of his belly and the tender gobble of his throat. After that...well, they decided to eat poor Vliddy. They set on him in a vulture pack, picking and nipping, biting and chewing, licking blood from hollows and sipping marrow from bones. All in all, filling their distended little cannibal bellies with Vliddy that bad and terrible boy. But, you know? Vliddy wasn't bad, he was quite yummy good after all.