Boys love toys and puppy dog tails
Girls love ribbons and spice
Old Men love to break dolls’ necks
To curse and spit on everything nice
The man returns home early one evening, as his wife and child had expected. The large white plastic bag in his arms is pregnant with a surprise foretold. The rustling folds of packaging paper whisper joys of the contents still concealed therein.
“Well now, look what Daddy’s brought us.”
“See son, just as I’d promised.”
The boy is standing erect, his hands rested flush along his pajama bottoms, looking like the only adult in the room. Patience breaks and he goes at the plastic bag, first tearing off a flap from the top, then tipping it over and upside down until the punching bag bounces out onto the floor.
“See? Just as Daddy promised.”
“There’s a pair of gloves that comes with it, too, but I left them in the car by mistake.”
But the boy has already engaged the bag like a wrestler, crawling over it lengthwise, pinning it under his weight between his legs to keep it from squirming, to make every punch count.
“Easy son, let’s find a place to hang it.”
“Sweetheart, let Daddy set it up nice for you to play with.”
The boy is now beating the bag’s face, with a single small but tightly clenched fist, while the other hand clutches at the folds under the face, which would normally represent the neck of the figure portrayed on the bag – the pink, plump, avuncular figure of PR executive Welsh Losser… except that Losser doesn’t have a neck.
“Hey, take it easy son.”
“Sweety, you’re going to hurt your hand.”
The boy lifts his weight off the bag’s bright blue canvas, only to lower his knee into its center, the figure’s gut, using his other leg to steady himself on the floor. The blows rain down harder now, overhead hooks thumping into Welsh Losser’s flesh, pummeling shallow craters into his jaw and head.
The straw stuffing can be heard to splinter and crack beneath the surface as if Losser’s ribs.
“Honey, pull him off.”
“Now that’s enough for one night, son,” threatens the father, lifting the boy up and off the bag by his rear end while the latter struggles to maintain his grip on the bag’s surface.
The boy yells, the mother yelps, the father grunts, determined to impose his will. A tantrum ensues.
What will the neighbors think?
The kid keeps throwing kicks into the air as he cries over his father’s shoulder, while the woman covers her mouth with one hand and with the other opens the door to his bedroom, where he’s deposited under great protest for the night, in the dark, where the Flying Ferret Dartboard, its cork board split asunder, still occupies a place in the corner near the window.
“So what happens next?”
“Next… Commix Girl kicks the living shit out of him.”
“Where… Where does she kick his ass?”
“Near the Commix Café, with its large street-front window broken.”
John Smith makes a few brief entries into his cardboard-covered pocket-sized notebook. He gets to his feet, throws several crumpled dollar bills on the table to cover the cost of the coffee and tips his hat in parting.
Back at the office, he’s again got the research desk to himself… to seek out case information that one simply cannot obtain in person.
THE FERRET NEWS SOURCE
“Hmm…”
‘The Ferret is an in-depth investigative journalism platform for Scotland and beyond…’
“Huh! And I’m a Kyiv-based detective.”
‘We are a work in progress and will continue to evolve. But our current plan is to work with our supporters to conduct a series of themed investigations.’
“How about this themed investigation: What could possess a shriveled-up septuagenarian shitkicker to hunt down and hack people up? Or… Why would a congenital liar bar none beat the hell out of a wannabe poet completely unknown to him out of pure spite? Or, or…”
Smith starts laughing, his face turned red from the brandy he’d helped himself to from under his boss’s desk.
‘Our longer-term aim is to secure enough subscribers to enable us to produce original journalism in the public interest on a regular basis.’
“And Welsh Losser’s long-term aim is to finish falling from that New Jersey bridge that he’s skidded off in that old Eldorado with his hands around Andrew Plum’s neck…
“Whatever happens, The Ferret will be nosing up the trousers of power.”
Smith lurches forward and spits out a mouthful of brandy that was going down wrong. He coughs hard and loud then starts trying to dry off a spill on his tie.
It’s late and his eyes are tired. But he’d sooner check into a Chinese whorehouse – and Smith simply hates anything Chinese – than go home just now.
So he logs onto Kyiv Unedited. It’s Story Hour on the site, recalls Smith, and Dirk Dickerson should be on the desk tonight.
The site opens up on the screen like the curtains of a cheap theater. Dickerson’s tension-filled voice makes a standardized introduction, and an old man with a dummy appears sitting on a stool center stage.
“So tell me, Dummy, have you ever been in love?”
“Heh, heh, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dude.”
“In love – have you ever been there? You know, long walks in the park with that special someone, kissing on the corner, daisies dangling upside down from one’s hand. And then, perhaps later, sitting side by side in a romantic café, whispering sweet nothings…”
“Dude, heh, heh, this sounds weird.”
“To each other, man to woman, boy to girl – but certainly not man to boy,” continues the old man to the dummy.
“Dude.”
“For that would not be right. It wouldn’t qualify as love. It would in fact be an abomination – an aberration of human feelings. A perversion, to be blunt.”
“Dude…”
“So if, for example, a giant clown should enter said establishment, leading to a bloodbath of grotesque proportions, leaving a slaughterhouse of carnage, a wrecking ball’s worth of damage behind…”
“Dude, wait.”
“… the Man and Boy, the perverts, the sickos, the freaks, would only have themselves to blame,” says the old man, now staring right into the dummy’s face.
The old man firmly clasps his large hand around the dummy’s neck, arranging his arm in a comfortable position, the elbow lowered, the wrist loose and free.
“Dude, don’t.”
The old man then snaps the dummy’s neck with one hand so that its head falls limp across his palm.
The curtains of the site close, Smith shuts off the computer, turns off the office light and goes home.
Filed by Dirk Dickerson, March 18, 2016