A story with no purpose; meaning, doubtful
Saint Stephan enters a vast, capacious cocktail lounge and bar.
Like the courtroom opera house he has just left, the lounge and bar is also housed under a high and massive dome.
As Stephan sits at the bar over his Scotch and soda on ice, the dome retracts, like an observatory’s, revealing a deep indigo sky blanketed in stars – a sight breathtaking and wondrous, awesome, powerful and moving.
The air, of both desert and mountain, rushes down and fills the space with delectable dry breezes, both warm and cool.
“Say, hello there, fella,” says someone suddenly at Stephan’s side.
Stephan turns his head right. Before him are two human beings, the male or femaleness of which he cannot immediately make out.
“Oh, um, hello…”
“I’m Mr. Electricity – and this is My Ideal!”
“Oh, ah, pleased to meet you. I’m Saint Stephan.”
“Yes, well, we might as well just come right out and say it! We saw you sitting here, Stephan, and immediately thought how you’d be perfect for…”
Stephan turns his head to his left; there is a stage with a shiny black reflecting floor, and on that stage a grand piano.
An annoying pattering and puttering can be heard coming from the stage, although the source of the noise is hidden.
Except for Stephan, no one else in the place pays any attention to the stage. People talk. They drink and relax, enjoying themselves at their tables and booths and in their corners.
The barkeep moves small baskets of salted peanuts, pretzels and chips toward Stephan and says it’s all right, their cost is already in the tab. Stephan always liked when service people managed to start friendly conversations without being intrusive or imposing, with small talk that wasn’t stupid or trite and could be built upon, at the customer’s election.
Back on the stage the noise grows louder, but still, except for Stephan, no one looks.
Then, out steps The Ferret.
“Heh-heh…”
He hops onto the stool behind the piano.
“Heh. This is a number a dwarf who calls himself David Lynch taught me back in Kyiv. I never thought I could play the piano, but he proved me wrong. I think he liked me – heh-heh-heh…”
The Ferret begins to play. It is Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”.
Except for Stephan, no one is watching the stage. Finally, Stephan also turns his head away, smiles down at his Scotch, and enjoys his drink.
After the sonata’s sad first movement, The Ferret melodramatically lays his knotted bumpy head down into flabby little arms he has crossed on the keys.
Saint Stephan’s watching music videos on the bar TV up above him to his right. The barman changes channels at will, but Saint Stephan doesn’t mind – why should he? Instead, he rattles the ice inside his whisky and soda and notes with compassion the barkeep’s inner anxiety as he worriedly focuses on a presidential debate for the highest office of the most powerful country in the world.
“You’re a fucking old hag,” Donald Trump shouts at Hillary Clinton.
Clinton is speechless, she is shocked.
Taking advantage, Trump follows up:
“You’re a fucking bimbo!!!”
The barkeep changes the channel back to videos.
“Is everything okay, sir,” he asks Saint Stephan.
“Well, I guess that remains to be seen,” Stephan answers cheerfully with a line very much like one Josh Davies, in his prime, might have delivered, as the two nod unspoken understanding.
“Heh… heh-heh… aaahh, so now I ask my wife to join me on this stage…”
Just as Stephan cranks his neck back toward the stage, a small woman drops above it hung by her neck. Her little feet kick and twitch one final time as her broken-necked body settles into a lazy indifferent alternating twirl. Pointed downward, the little baby-blue jazz shoes she wore (or was made to wear) for the occasion reflect back up from the stage’s shiny black floor, which her feet had not quite reached.
“I hate it when she just hangs around – heh…”
The dead woman’s mouth opens and The Ferret’s cage droppings fall out.
“Heh,” The Ferret speaks to the audience, none of whom is watching, except for Stephan, “I didn’t know she had so many hang-ups, heh-heh-heh…”
[Whether The Ferret’s jokes are going over is not for us to say. We just report the facts as we get them, in this instance from Jack Step. We put our full faith and trust in the accuracy of his reporting – Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board]
“That’s what you get for reading my emails to Welsh Losser in New Jersey. That’s what you get for kissing Bill Publowsky coming out of Le Murd in Kyiv that one night. Heh! You think I didn’t see it?! Heh – you think I don’t know?!”
The Ferret’s verbiage turns into a wall of buzzing sound, and for Stephan the words begin to run together and grow indistinct.
Like a gnome, from side to side, The Ferret kicks up his cloven feet – first one, then the other. He points with a claw at the hanging body of his wife. He keeps making some kind of comments.
“Heh, heh… heh-heh-heh-heh…”
Stephan decides to turn around on his stool to where his back was.
Sunken in a broad soft lounge chair with a drink, he recognizes Welsh Losser – that is, the taller, stronger, smarter and somewhat better-looking older brother of Welsh Losser, the one who’d disappeared from Kyiv some time ago, and whose whereabouts are presently unknown, except for rumors.
With a noticeable degree of lumbering, Welsh Losser rises. The lights go out and then come on again, centered on Welsh Losser. As 1930s music pipes in, Welsh Losser begins to dance, and he dances toward Saint Stephan.
His arms out ballet-like, Welsh Losser points his toes as he turns and twirls with the endearingly primitive but hard-won grace and elegance he had suffered so many years of tortured practice, repetition and training to master.
Welsh Losser dances closer and closer. Pirouetting, he is now only a few feet away.
“Ah, no… no!!!”
Saint Stephan turns again in his seat. The music stops, the lights change back to normal lounge lighting. Welsh Losser – the older, better one – is gone.
“Is everything all right, sir? Can I refresh that drink?”
“Sure.”
“Eh, so now, I’m going to, heh, ask… aaahh, no, heh, tell, yeah, that’s right, tell my children to come out on stage.”
Hybrid half-breed Ferret mongrels trot out toward their father onto the stage. Upon closer inspection, they look amazingly like Welsh Losser – the younger, inferior Welsh Losser, the former Kyiv denizen, self-published Amazon Kindle writer and PR professional who has disappeared.
“First, I know you can’t do this,” The Ferret says in a way that is meant to humiliate his kids as he walks vertically up the side of the grand piano, taking advantage of some inexplicable suction action in the keratin of the cloven hooves that comprise his feet.
“And I know you can’t do this…”
Although the effort is labored, The Ferret unfolds his little black batwings and, lifting up from the piano, his flabby little arms outstretched, flaps his way up above the stage and out of sight.
“And I know for sure you can’t do this,” he shouts down from wherever he is.
Stephan watches as The Ferret plummets to the stage, landing squarely on his protective turtle-shell back, immediately after which he hops to his feet to show just how easy that was for him and how he wasn’t hurt.
His children, with clearly compromised Ferret powers, look down at their human-like feet, embarrassed, bewildered. They can’t walk up any sides, and they don’t have wings – only little underdeveloped black bumps on their backs that never made it.
“So now,” The Ferret says, “I want you to fly. Jump from the stage, like I taught you, and fly, fly, fly!!! Heh!”
The Boy version jumps and lands on his face.
The Girl version jumps and lands on her face too.
“Do it again, heh-heh, again!!!”
They do this over and over but Saint Stephan now pays the antics no mind.
“I’m going to eat you – I’ll eat you, heh-heh-heh…”
And although he hears the terrible crunching sounds and the heartrending children-like screams, Stephan has his drink.
“Say, fella – remember us – Mr. Electricity and My Ideal!!!”
Filed by Jack Step, CTFSA, May 4, 2016