Pretty little birdy sitting in the tree, feathers so bright, singing a song that floats across the fields and drops like honey balm. Down at the bottom of the well, sitting in the slime is Jonny Jumpknees. It is dark down there, but the sweet song reaches even his weary ears, or that is to say, the holes where his ears used to be. Johnny Jumpknees had all the bits required to be human once upon a time but now they have rotted away or cling on with thread-like sinews and clotted blood. Once he was Jonathan Jackson and a fine looking fellow, six feet tall with a mop of auburn hair. As a child he was a sweet looking boy with freckles, dimples and curls, the whole Shirley Temple deal and the ladies of the town fussed and doted.

However, his daddy was a cunt. It turns out there are only so many beatings and incestuous fumblings a person can take before it alters them, before their heart splits and their soul decays. Jonathan Jackson’s descent began by showing his tiny pre-pubescent glans to the small girls and boys in the playground. Five years later he would jump from behind bushes and walls and reveal himself to any female that happened past. No matter how many times he did it and no matter how many times those women screamed and cried and ran to the police, nothing appeared to happen to Jonathan. His father was the priest and used his not inconsiderable influence to keep the law at bay. Jonathan Jackson was untouchable and exerted a low hum of fear over the townsfolk. He became known as Jonny Jumpknees because of the strange hop and skip he used to confront the town’s nanas, aunties, mums, sisters and daughters. It wasn’t the fact of their gender that made them targets, it was their significance in relation to their men, for Jonny Jumpknees hated men.

Whilst the law of the land may have been looking in another direction, inside Jonny’s house Gods own law was being applied with increasing vigour. The more God chastised Johnny the more he paraded his priapic glory, finding new and creative ways to reveal himself to mitigate his own pain. Consequently, as is Gods way of course, the more furious was his punishment.

One day Johnny could take it no more. Finding himself delivered of a mighty strength he caved in the priestly cranium with a cruciform paperweight. As the adrenaline seeped away Jonny was left with a numb absence where the anger used to be, and he felt quite dead. Knowing that there was no daddy to keep the police away Jonny fled out of the back gate and ran for miles. In the dark he did not see the well and tumbled headlong to the bottom. Even had he wanted to escape he could not. There was a trickle of dirty water and enough drowned protein in that wretched mud to keep him just a little bit alive. There Jonny Jumpknees stayed, hating the little yellow birdy and the patch of sky above him. He became a hideous decayed bogey man for the children in the town who were told his tale as a warning and who told their children in turn. It was the tale of Jonny Jumpknees who found out that two wrongs do not make a right.