Walter and Mort

A microfiction inspired by a photograph I once took.

Before Walter ran away as a young man to work in the carnival, he'd never thought of arnadillos as, well, trainable. He'd not thought of armadillos at all, really.

But then, deep in the Florida Panhandle, he'd crossed paths with the ’dillo he came to know as Mort. Neither Walter nor Mort — nor the carnival — was ever the same again. Indeed, for days after the carnival left a given town, a handful of the show's patrons would wake up in the middle of the next four or five nights, bathed in cold sweat and, in extreme cases, screaming…