Zippy Zamazda, clad in baby-blue pajamas, lies restless in bed, tossing, turning and sometimes lifting his rump right into the air. His spouse, unperturbed, has long fallen fast asleep, with the Valentine’s Day copy of What’s Off magazine on her breast beneath crossed arms.
A dream bubble appears above Zippy’s now sleep-filled face.
“I told you not to go to Kyiv,” says an elderly man in an angry voice.
“But I wanted to become a writer and tell everyone how it is,” Zippy answers.
“Dumb ass! I didn’t pay out all that cash for you to study at that fancy school, only to end up working at a third-rate English-language newspaper in the former Soviet Union,” says the father.
“I was chief editor.”
“So was everyone else who showed up at the rag with a bag on his back and no socks on his feet … and besides that you got fired. Don’t think I didn’t hear about it.”
Zippy hugs his pillow ever tighter, and the seams of his pajama bottoms look ready to burst between his buttocks.
“Please leave him alone and give him the money, honey. He’ll one day be rich and famous but now just needs liquidity, you see, for roof over head and plenty of grub in the cupboard,” says an elderly woman in a homely voice.
“Shut up!”
“Don’t talk to me that way!”
A small-winged creature enters Zippy’s bedroom through the open window and alights on the night stand, clearly delighted to witness the dream sequence.
“Heh, heh, cool.”
A beam of light from a passing motor vehicle outside on the street below reveals the creature to be none other than Ferret Light Aqua Fresh, his grimy dark leggings littered with cloud dust.
“Grow up boy and get serious, like me your dad from the old land,” restarts the father.
“Stop it. Stop it. You sound no better than a Jew, you,” says the mother, breaking into blubbering sobs.
Then the father, without warning, reaches over into his wife’s dream bubble to clutch and throttle her throat.
“Ouch, heh, heh,” remarks The Ferret.
“Rhinos and rabbits and hares,” is all that Zippy can manage to mutter, now trying to cover eyes and ears with those same two hands, which ends up making him look like a stuffed child’s toy.
But The Ferret will give him no respite and begins to hover over the oversized infant with a little wand that emits sparkles of purple and gold, but which The Ferret uses to poke strategically, if not sadistically, into different points of Zamazda’s head.
Unable to fend off The Ferret’s air assault, Zippy takes cover under his pillow, curling the rest of his oversized physique into a tense fetal position, soon losing consciousness.
When he awakes, Zippy finds himself on a desert island, parched with thirst. The island abounds with coconut palms and banana trees. But atop each one sits a Ferret armed to the teeth with tropical missiles that can be launched from a crudely fashioned slingshot. Every time that Zippy tries to knock loose a low-hanging fruit – as he’s too fat to shimmy up a tree – The Ferrets cease their mutual hostilities and pelt him viciously with coconut shrapnel from all angles.
Finally, after nearly a week of dehydration and sunstroke, Ziippy notices the arrival of a ship, and the approach of its captain, wearing a Quaker’s wig, in a rowboat.
The Ferrets begin to rant and screech like a troop of monkeys, and then race off into the island’s interior.
Zippy raises a limp arm to alert the seaman to his presence and surely precipitate his rescue. But the captain is busy digging a hole near the tree line.
Finally Zippy shouts, “I’m here, old man from the sea. Come save me if you will.”
The captain, a shriveled-up sailor in saggy breeches and frock coat approaches cautiously, breaking into a crooked smile as he nears. Raising his shovel in an offhand salute, he then lowers it onto Zippy’s unsuspecting skull and mercilessly picks up the pace.
Our hero again loses consciousness, this time awaking in the offices of Welsh Losser, Kyiv-based writer and PR executive.
“So I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do, Zippy,” says Losser, pointing a wet cigar at Zippy from across his desk. “You take over the Kyiv Poster and What’s Off both, doing with them what you will. You’ll be the chief of chief editors and can fire anyone whom you want. You’ll be a man of many hats, be it a fedora, derby or sheep-skinned Cossack headdress.”
“Why, thank you, Mister Losser, I don’t know what to say,” Zippy responds, mechanically, as if outside himself.
“No thanks are necessary, lad. There’s just one catch, you must know.”
“What’s that?”
“I need you to appear as the poster boy on the packaging of a new product I endorse. It’s called bovine milk balls, and they can make a man feel like a horse,” says Losser snapping his fingers in punctuation.
Two valets enter the office and place a cow’s hide over Zippy’s head, his eyes peering out from dark holes and his neck weighed down by the horns. Then Losser holds up a mirror, as the valets begin attaching Christmas lights and other holiday decorations to the horns.
Zippy awakens again, this time back in his bedroom, in the company of his sleeping spouse alone. All is quiet, except the distant buzzing of an insect.
But the buzzing grows louder, and soon Zippy feels it alight on his nose, till Ferret Light Aqua Fresh grows a heavy nuisance on Zamazda’s face.
He says…
The tropic of cancer is cold in the winter
Cold in the winter and naked at night
The tropic of cancer is cold in the winter
Cold in the winter without any light
The sun’s right overhead in June
But it’s cold in the winter and we’re naked at night
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, freelance for Philosophers Digest, Annex and Omnibus, November 5, 2013