The Complete "Forgiving Steve"

Before his sudden arrival, there hadn’t been a single recorded act of violence in 18 years, not since a security was knocked to the ground (albeit inadvertently) during a theft in The Blueprint Chamber of City Hall.

Suddenly, it seems that regular citizens can’t punch each other fast enough.

A grocery store manager was chased into the parking lot and nearly lynched for raising the price of bulk celery by two cents; a regular yearly increase that had always previously gone unnoticed.

Old women trip children with their canes; young men throw their shoes at unattractive women; policemen fall victim to snowballs kept through the winter in basement freezers at a rate previously employed only in active Arctic combat zones.

Christ, even innocent dogs were having their ears boxed by the small but tenacious homeless dwarf population.

While the city’s previous Black Market had thrived almost exclusively on bootleg phone conversations (including the wildly popular “The Complete Forgiving Steve” which shed more light on the human condition than one thousand cameras pointed at the exits of one thousand strip clubs), it has now been replaced by back-alley aspirin peddlers, car-trunk-novelty-football-helmet-merchants and implausible head trauma bandage dealers.

He is oblivious to the carnage all around him as he attempts to not step on the cracks of the sidewalk, absentmindedly whistling along to the song transmitting directly into his hearing aid:

“Here’s where the commercial would be,
If you were listening to the radio or watching TV.”