“There is a little man in my house.”
by PIGS +
>>24454243
>A higher third washed over me.
I don’t understand this phrase/reference, but I can guess: A major third?
Like, your MC’s misery just inflected into triumph, going from a lower minor third to a higher one?

>Even now, I realised, they serve their little men. Such is their denial, these poor sops, out of sheer complacency.
>I myself am convinced the theme and requirement are in there.
The Liliputian-plighted folks’ acquiescence to it all is a taste of crowd-madness, so I’m on your side.
However, the “madness of crowds” theme IS secondary to your duet-dynamic between the MC and his little man.
I know there’s no explicit rule saying that the theme requirement has to be the central, largest theme present therein, but including a short coda where the MC returns to the tavern and simply regards the “poor-sop” crowd, whose little men are all still alive ;_; might have precluded some of the complaints you’ve been getting about theme-adherence.

Your writing here is made of metal—hit it with a hammer and it rings.
>Beaten bloody and routed, the little man jeering, they rejoice in their sin…
The start of this sentence…the exact construction you use is something I’ve employed before in my own writings—my formula being:
>Thing#1 + perfect passive participle --(comma)--> thing#2 + present active participle --(comma)--> subject + main verb.
Only you go further with the second half of the sentence:
>, as I lay in the gutter, thrown out in the street, they laugh at my dishevelled corpse.
And I think it’s an amazing extension…if you put the period after “street,” that is—end the construction where it began (with another PPP on thing#1), instead of re-re-maining another verb.

>I became revolted, probably recognising some form of my own shortcomings in their indifference
>shortcomings
>mocking my gait, my lisp, my very being.
>lisp
What self-damning disclosures these were to discover.
I don’t know if it’s your MC’s own self-smallness reflected back, or their internalization of others’ attacks/insults, or something exotic in their mind or world—the reader gets to decide, and it’s wonderful.
You show us the “What happens…” but you never elaborate on the “Why?” and I am here for it.
That Egyptain poem I read starts similarly—the MC speaks to the reader in first-person, yet skips any and all elaboration (almost as if doing so is self-verboten).

So many /lwc/ submissions (past & present) drench themselves in flavorful details and expositional backstories—e.g., your May submission—but you’ve done something here that has diverged from all that, and to much apparent success: You made short sexy.
Not just “short” though—JimmyTard said it best:
>concise.

>a knocked over thimble.
a knocked-over thimble
>awkward coworker hallway grins
awkward coworker-hallway grins

Immensely impressed you wrote all this sans time!