Saint Stephan behind bars
Church house janitor jailed
Ghostwriter goes to gaol
No way out for holy boy gone bad…
The prisoner sits, returned to his cell, in the basement of a dilapidated apartment block on Naberezhnaya Lugovaya Street in Podil. He’s chained to the radiator, now toasty to the touch. Thick wet snowflakes plunge headlong past his window, filling the damp gray air like feathers from a pillow fight before they splash into the pavement and mostly dissolve.
The trees are bare and brown, the rooftops frosty and white. It could almost be a Christmas setting if those noisy cars on the road would turn into horse-drawn sleighs, if that skinny dog were a timid deer foraging for sparse winter fare, instead of pissing on a bush.
Stephan recalls a snow-filled holiday engraving from Medieval France that he’d seen as a boy. There’s of course a picnic table full of men in peaked hats and tights, feasting on ale and fowl, with busty wenches aplenty attending to every plate and chalice. But he’d always been more interested in the old man pulling the donkey overloaded with kindling in the engraving’s backdrop. There was a wood back there, too, that got darker and more entangled the deeper it went. The old man appeared to be heading toward it, but why, if he’d already collected his kindling?
Was this a mistake on the part of the artist? Or was the old man not invited to partake in the Medieval merrymaking, forbidden to help himself to a roasted drumstick, excluded from the handholding circle of dancers, banned from the scene altogether beyond the silly but enticing sounds of the crumhorn, tabor and lute?
A mournful bellyache of a sound starts up on the other side of his cell wall, insistent in its despair, purposely calling out to anyone caring or uncaring to hear, self-pity beyond reconciliation, despondency for the pleasure of it, misery to the point of high art.
It’s almost dark now, and Stephan, wide-eyed and sallow-skinned, could pass for a cloistered monk waiting for the call to Matins. Not that he’d uttered a single prayer since his days at the church-run children’s school outside Kyiv. Faith had abandoned him, but not the aura of the faithful. His nimbus, now dull, greasy and opaque, still held hope of enlightenment, or so he secretly believed.
But evil touched is evil stained. Death in a sack of wrinkly skin had asked him to look in and he didn’t look away. In fact, he stared into the blackest bottom one’s eyes could ever imagine, while shut.
Everything was in that stinking sack – cold-hearted greed, bloody carnage, incestuous lust and an insatiable longing to live beyond death, while others die in his place.
The moan has now turned to groan in the neighboring cell, whose occupant has taken to clawing his nails into the wall. The lower extremities of his frame – hips and legs alike – don’t writhe in pain but squirm in the restless desire to feel pain, the severe physical kind so as to match the mental anguish so vividly experienced by his mind.
“I know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not going to work. You see? You’re not going to get away with it, because I’m on to your plan, I know what you’re up to you son of a bitch and got you pegged, in my sights,” the man says in a mocking, sore-throated ramble.
Stephan picks up his crust of bread and dirty tin of water and begins going back over the events of his day.
The prosecutor was relentless, to be sure. But that was to be expected. Was there another way to conduct a murder trial… even if no one had been murdered… at least not by him? ‘Character assassin,’ ‘Judge, jury and executioner of other men’s reputations,’ ‘Internet sniper hiding behind a cyberspace firewall to keep from taking return fire,’ were just some of the accusations flung at him during the trial.
But the character witnesses were the most damning. That fat-ass in the fedora with the beady eyes and curled quivering lip. He just kept it coming, accusing the unemployed copy editor of this and that, even before he was asked by the prosecutor. It was as if he wanted to get it all out of his system, everything that he thought or desired to be true, and as quick as possible, as if the more and faster he talked, the less he felt was the chance of his eyes meeting those of the man he was so desperately trying to bury, far and deep below the earth where no one would look to find him. Funny how he plowed out of the courtroom after stepping off the stand, pulling that stupid hat over his eyes, as if he’d just dealt a well-deserved ass-kicking to some punk kid.
Then there was fat-ass No. 2: Stupid – yeah, and arrogant, too. No lack of observed envy here either.
“Of course Stephan is a malicious loser – what do you expect me to say. Yes, I was given a job and much needed salary by the defendant, but that doesn’t mean that I liked him, so what?”
He left the courtroom like a cow, though ambling and in no apparent hurry to get back to his job at the paper in question.
“You’re going down, Step. You know it and so do I,” returns the voice from the other side of the wall.
“Not just me, all by myself with no one to feel just as bad. I’ll take the fall, Step, and trip your ass as I go down. That’s right. I’ll clutch a handful of suit coat or pant pockets and bring you along for the ride,” shouts the man with a malicious smile that can almost be heard through the wall.
And it could be… if not for an almost perfectly timed musical intermission coming from the wall on the other side.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Coming home to take me away
I’m as guilty as pie and don’t ask why
Coming home to take me away
Filed by Commix Writer 42M: filling in on Day Shift, December 1, 2015