Good Harold's Epiphany
 

 None of the captives wept overly loud during their interrogation and the senior interrogator cracked nary an insidious smile. It was just another reoccurring day at the dungeon. Harold the Torturer, it seems, had lost not the knack, but the love for his trade.

  He was brought up in his mother’s penal colony for expecting widowed mothers and spent his early years there foraging for leeks and truffles with his constant companion, Skippy the pig. Harold’s desires were simple ones; eat, poop, sleep. But deep within his being, far beyond the mud encrusted eyebrows and musky halo of his body odor, laid a gem of a soul, bursting to the brim with the potential to contribute something of value and purpose to the modern medieval world.

  Harold would lay awake during naptime while the expected children around him napped contently. “I wish I could be like these happy impoverished children who have no father and a mother who digs yams to render taxes”, he thought yearningly.  Yet the pain of unachieved success gnawed at his being like the wolves who had eaten Skippy the night before.

  Finding himself pig and truffle-less, Harold solemnly made his way toward adulthood. The clothing he had worn as a child was now very restricting and his pigskin breeches chaffed his inner thighs. The lack of circulation in his legs compelled him to pull himself from his napping spot and go forth into the yonder to find a tailor and what would prove to be his destiny.

 An arduous journey full of dangerous chaffing awaited him. If he could just make it to the horizon, another horizon would be just up ahead. And just up ahead some new breeches were waiting for him. He was sure of it. 

  And then the unexpected happened. As if by some preordained act, the inseam of his skin-tight, yet not so alluring pants gave way. The instant release of circulation to his age old, pent up, veal calf-like thigh meat into the open air was both excruciatingly painful and wonderfully liberating. “Freedom! Freeeedum!” Harold screamed with tears of tormented ecstasy. The blood began to circulate through his legs and his toes felt like a thousand tiny gophers were living in them. And then it dawned on him with the clarity of a chorus of ten thousand tax-poor widows in pain of childbirth; Pain brings Pleasure. His course was now set. 

 After attending torture classes at the local vo-tech for two years while working part-time as a truffle collector, Harold was now ready to ply his trade. He summoned all his wits about him and traveled four miles by foot to the great castle of the fair and noble Lord Kyle. Harold boldly crawled unto the King and pronounced, “I wants to hurt people!” Kyle said, “Okay”, and gave him a temp-to-hire position in the eye-gouging department.

 Harold liked his job but it kind of lost its luster after awhile. You’ve seen one roasted carcass, you’ve seen ‘em all. But we all go through that on occasion. He always said he would give it all up to become a tailor, but his family needed the benefits.