Nobody could be exactly sure where he came from, one of those savage islands in the Western Pacific. That's where real he-men eat their neighbors for lunch. They eat yams for desert. He was a cannibal; so ugly he scared the maggots off the cadavers, very muscular, black as lacquer, but short. He smelled like mildewing clothes in a mortuary. He didn't usually trouble wearing clothes much. For some reason he was friendless and wondered almost continuously. Of course Dwight ate women when he could get them. Facts developed after the autopsy explained that, as a boy, he'd been involved with a big oil company. Big oil companies are cannibals, too. The wicked Hallelujah-Burton oil company was exterminating natives on an idyllic island. They were clearing space on the idyllic island for a golf course for company managers and a petro-toxins subsidiary. Doctor Dicky Chainy, the corporate vet, was presented with the adolescent Dwight. Usually Doctor Chainy's practice was limited to caring for the pets accumulated by oil company executives, budgies, carnivorous reptiles and comely orangutans. Dwight was so delightfully scruffy, all bushy hair and the reek of decay, that the doctor dropped him into a cage to kept as a mascot. Being nothing but savages, cannibals don't really have names. The doctor was just feeling generous. He gave him one on credit, intending to wring some slave labor from him later on. Dicky thought about calling him George, but that was the name of the president of the exterminators who were making the island safe for the golf course. He couldn't use George. Bruce was taken, too. That was his wife's name, Bruce Lyre. She had a mustache and kept a garden of herbs. Dicky settled on Dwight as the boy's name and he used him in experiments. The doctor's grandfather had proudly served as a scientist in a Nazi concentration camp during World War Two (ah! those were the good old days). He was at Ravensbruck and mostly lopped pieces off women that someone else had bludgeoned into unconsciousness. He did valuable studies on right nipples and healthy, virginal labia minora; that's pussy-lips for laymen. He kept them in neatly labeled baggies with his collection of frogs. Somehow, a labia minora isn't as interesting bagged amongst embalmed amphibians. The envious grandson, Chainy, the younger, wanted to be famous too. He wanted to experiment. He injected Dwight with genes from the Borneo lightening bug. It's nine inches long and is a beacon for native canoers struggling to row home at night. There weren't any native canoers left. They don't buy oil or petro-toxins. The doctor hit Dwight up right in the dick; 7 ccs of lightening bug genes. It might have been a bit of a strong dose, but with dicks and lightening bug genes, you can never be sure. You should have seen Dwight when he got excited! He looked like the taillight of an old-time Cadillac car. When he took a piss it was like one of those French water shows where the lights merrily shimmer over the fountain; spectacular! He couldn't be exhibited in mixed company. He scared the white women what with his drooling, gurgling and that blinking bayonet; he was kind of pointy, you see. It was from years of filing it down on rough stones to assure stake-like penetration. If Dwight did a good trick, Chainy gave him a chocolate chip cookie. He liked chocolate chip cookies, but he liked women best; just raw and juicy, thanks. Gladas was what Doctor Chainy called his secretary. It wasn't her name, but he didn't care. She was only a white slave, one of thousands toiling for Hallelujah-Burton. Why did she need a name at all? She was a Sunday school teacher. Hallelujah-Burton only hired Christians. They had to say, "amen!" and not ask questions. Gladas, or whatever her name was, had given Dicky his daily enema and defibrillation when a madly aroused Dwight got loose. He ate her. Chainy didn't miss her for several days until he realized that his colon hadn't been flushed. It was a nasty business getting that mess excavated after a week of cocktail parties. Caviar is ghastly when digested and fermented into compact boles. Secretaries don't grow on trees, you know. They cost the company a fortune to import from Texas. Texas girls are best. They don't know any better and they're Christians. Chainy couldn't let Dwight eat the female help. He sent him away on the next tanker bound for Mexico. It doesn't matter if big oil companies slop a lot of oil around the Mexican seashore. They eat tocos and don't speak proper English. Dwight had to tread water for two weeks in the gloomy tank; he really tread oil, of course. He had nothing to light his gloom except his pointy pecker. He tried to keep it ground down on the rough steel bulkhead, but it was way too oily. It felt good all the same. Dwight had nothing to eat. Now and then, the ship's captain, Franklin Buchanan, a descendant of the bachelor president, opened the hatch to let him catch rain water on his tongue. Once he threw him a cat, but it was cooked. There's an old story about a murderer called Hugh Pentecost, the cannibal who overate. That was in 1962. He was a baby sitter. Mom would come home, bend over the crib to kiss her darling good night, but it would be Hugh in the crib. He'd gobble her up. Mister Pentecost ate seventeen women and part of a hijacked penguin before he was caught. He wanted everyone to know that it was a female penguin. It's hard to tell, especially after some of the best parts have been devoured. He got caught because he puked going down in the elevator from a sumptuous feast. She'd been a hefty mama! It wasn't really digested yet. One of the passengers recognized a tuft of hairy labia majora that he'd been admiring just the night before. Hugh was tried for eating women. You wouldn't think that that would be a crime. Since he was still wearing his Bush-for- President button, they only charged him with one killing. A good Republican is always allowed to kill several people before it's really considered a crime. It's called the Druce Rule. He went to jail at a place called Frackville. The guards are cannibals there. They eat each other. The point is that cannibals are people, too. They get hungry. When Dwight was drained out of the oil tanker in Mexico he was famished. He found a woman fishing off the quay. He ate her. The scraps fell in to feed the fish. Fish are cannibals only if they eat other fish. Isn't that strange? The senorita was wearing a bright floral dress. Dwight liked floral patterns. Slick with filthy oil, he shinnied into the dress. It's just as well. It camouflaged Blinky, his luminescent appendage. It was strobeing with particular gaiety. The Mexican fisher woman had been a hot dish! So started Dwight's travels. He walked around Mexico. He was never greedy. He wasn't an American or an oil company. He only ate when he was really hungry, and then he only ate women who didn't flee from him on sight. Nobody misses a few women except their kids and guys. After a while he discovered bowling balls and spray paint. That was after he'd wondered across into Texas. After eating some woman with a gun who'd been guarding the border, he wondered into a town. There, in a store window, were bowling balls. They were the most beautiful things Dwight had ever seen. Some were colored and iridescent. Others were marbled. Some had holes in them. Others were marvelously perfect spheres. He heaved a woman and her baby carriage through the plate glass and selected a shiny, midnight black orb festooned with three apertures of a size convenient for his stubby fingers. From then on, he carried the treasure with him everywhere he went. Some parts of Texas are devoid of Texans. It made Dwight's Westward trek lonesome and hungry. Dwight stopped to make a mask. He was from a highly cultured people, after all. They had a mask- wearing tradition. It was something about the gods and spirits. Christians do that too at the end of October. Finding a little rill, he used mud, that was the standard material in his culture, to make the mask. It was more like a helmet that fit down over his whole head. He found a dog for the hair. It was road kill. It stank. Naked, black, walking down a dusty lane with his crumbling road-kill mask over his head, Dwight though himself a great success, a kind of radiant idol that the world had been waiting for, a hero. Men are like that. They have delusions of being important, but it's the women who are the sustenance of existence. Through the muddy eye-slits he saw a boy spray painting a sign. The paint was yellow. It was beautiful. The boy fled to report the naked black stranger to his parents. Its always a good idea to report naked black strangers to your parents. In Texas, they know what to do with naked black strangers, especially if their peters flash like an ambulance. It didn't take long for Dwight to figure out how to make the paint can work. He sprayed his mask a flashy yellow. It was so gorgeous that he sprayed his whole body. Men are like that, too. They become obsessed with a new thing and over-do it. What do you think cars would be like if it were up to women? Think about it. In one town Dwight found a bright super market. There were women in it. He ate one. There were also chocolate chip cookies. They were in boxes with pictures on the outside. He ate the cookies, too. Can life be better that that? women and boxed chocolate chips! He discovered that his bowling ball made a nifty weapon. One blow and a woman was as good as brunch, or he could use it to club his way into buildings. He hadn't mastered doors yet. If some silly bystander tried to take his lunch away from him, Dwight had but to whaled him between the eyes with the black orb. Only rarely did anyone make a nuisance of himself. It was usually a husband who hadn't gotten to know his wife very well yet and still thought she was nice. Some grooms object to a naked black stranger dining on the bride. Only once did an ancient patriarch battle him. He protected his old wife with such ferocity that Dwight figured that he wanted to eat her himself. He let the old man have her. In his culture one respects his elders. They're allowed to eat women, too. In New Mexico Dwight got hit by a semi-trailer. He was left for road-kill for some weeks. He was still spray painted yellow. That's what all life comes down to, dog or man, so much road-kill littering a lane to nowhere, some of it decorated yellow. Dwight's heinous rampage had been widely reported on Snitch-Your-Neighbor Television so he was recognized by a passing student driver. She wasn't fooled. Not many black men have lightening bug genes in their jeans. Snitch-Your-Neighbor paid her the reward; a year's supply of disposable diapers; the most remarkable development of modern society. Ten thousand centuries of human evolution has finally lifted us to disposable diapers. Authorities realized that Dwight's crimes had been committed in the great state of Texas so that's where he was tried. The fact that he was already dead only meant that there would be a savings of state resources after the trial. Texas has a court system like Pennsylvania's: if accused, guilty. For the trial, the modest Texans kept Dwight in a large manila envelope. Execution was by lethal injection. The executioner took the lethal drug home and sold it on the street for a big profit. Junkies recognized it as really good shit! After the execution, the cadaver was awarded to Hallelujah- Burton. The convict, dead or alive, owed the oil company for his passage to Mexico from the South Seas. They sold stock in Dwight. It's still traded on the NASDAQ under the symbol BLINKY.