This, Being Part 3, The Third
Like I said…
But, you gotta take it easy, man…
Around Kowalski wrenches and twists his scrunched-up body – toward the black and swelling leather-jacketed outline of the Guinea.
And as he turns, Kowalski sees the Half Guinea just finishing lifting a terrified Ferret by the collar of his dark-green cereal-box vampire sport jacket. He is using only his right arm, resembling a tower crane in his movements, as he finally impales the jacket nape onto a hook, or a large nail, imbedded between stone blocks high in the wall.
The Guinea appears to grow – no, Kowalski observes – actually does grow… in physical size, as he also grows increasingly demented. The almond eyes are frighteningly larger, becoming muddy pools of depthless, spaceless evil, neither emitting light, nor taking any in.
His clothing grows with him, except for the cheap, three-quarter-length black leather jacket, which creaks and squeaks against the strain of the expanding musculature now bulking out the ancient Roman freak, reducing itself proportionately to something like half-size as compared to the now demonically enlarged Guinea.
His cranelike moves are nothing but continual monstrousness in motion – pure malevolence; terrifying and sinister.
With one finger he holds the Ferret in place against the wall to minimize the jerking and swinging of his flabby, turtle-shaped body.
The Ferret’s mouth is agape in speechless terror; the ingesting orifice, formerly lined with pointy, petty-evil teeth, designed by Josh Davies, is now a black shapeless hollow, and looking like it’d been purposely ripped open wider at the corners to form a large black jagged cavity of hopeless horror.
From inside the Ferret’s mouth, blood continuously coats his green-gray lips, most, or all of the sharp little teeth knocked out, or, far more likely, knocked in, by the Guinea’s massive and relentless leathery brown fist; the Ferret, forced to swallow them, the Guinea with a finger shoving them down the Ferret’s no-neck throat.
The Guinea slowly turns his head over his right shoulder toward Kowalski. Looking at Kowalski, staring at him with his black unblinking giant’s eyes, to underscore, Kowalski thinks, the unnatural calm and enjoyment with which he’s disassembling the Ferret, while gleefully demonstrating in childlike manner the nauseating prodigy of his demon-gifted strength. And so, for clownish show before Kowalski, the Guinea now bunches the front of the Ferret’s black turtleneck sweater into his massive fist, and with it playfully shakes his prey.
No more “heh-heh-heh” from the Ferret, for now he lows in beastlike torment – “mweeehh… mweeehh…” like a baby bull calf, as blood in slow but regular pulses oozes and drips out his destroyed mouth. He coughs and chokes reflexively. Vomitus, which he can’t bring up in full, gurgles in his throat, which, by a rattle and a shaking, the Guinea forces the Ferret to swallow. Crazed and piglike, the Ferret grunts and snorts spit, snot, and blood up through his nose.
As he handles the Ferret according to his will, the Half Guinea continues to keep his face turned toward Steve Kowalski.
And now Kowalski sees the Guinea’s lips fairly double in size, and then grow larger still, and, having gone shiny-slick and wet from drooling, they remain parted, as the corners of his bluing mouth turn down and down.
The Half Guinea now turns his head back to center his full attention on the Ferret, and with his enormous left fist lays into his gut and ribcage – very, very hard; and the Ferret is transformed in his pain into complete, perhaps even angelic, silence, as though he’d somehow gone pure, as though what is being done to him by the Guinea is way beyond anything he’d ever deserved for all his sins; for all his crimes.
The depravity of the scene, of the Guinea’s actions, for Kowalski is unbearable.
But, breathing slowly, heavily, excitedly, the Guinea breaks the Ferret’s dying silence and repeats his hammer blows of further, unquestionable, irreversible, incontestable… death – again and again.
And now, very, very sadly, and very sorrowfully, there is nothing from the Ferret but what is beyond the first silence, cast in some hellish world of burning beasts; a place where there is no remit of pain and grief – and it is something last and final and involuntary, which can’t be helped, like the distressed lowing and moo of a calf being slowly, savagely slaughtered. Except it is far more distant, far more removed from the present world, and unwanted by it; and vehemently alien to our earthly ears in its reverberations. The sound is un-Ferret-like, let alone unhuman.
And Kowalski cannot take it. From his little chair behind the small plastic table, he crashes with his knees against the floor’s cold cement. With head bowed, his hands covering his face, and voice muffled by weeping, Kowalski, shaking, cries uncontrollably, and tries, with all his spiritual might, through his tears of mercy and compassion for the Ferret, to plead, implore, and beg that the Guinea…
“Stop, stop, oh, please… please… STO-O-O-O-OP!!!” Kowalski keeps trembling and shaking.
“Don’t worry, Stevie. I know it’s nothing you can do. But we’re friends, right? So, I’m taking care of him for you; otherwise, he’d’ve beaten you to a bloody pulp… kicked your ass…”
The Guinea looks at Kowalski, as he holds with one hand the rattling Ferret rag pinned against the stone-block wall, and opens his large-large and depraved and twisted mouth… wide-wide-wide…
“Ha-HAAAAA!!!” the Half Guinea laughs, like the demented, age-old circus clown he truly is, and has ever been…
And Kowalski falls and falls, disappearing into the bottomless, inky black maw…
But, careening through the dark, with glaring lights streaming backwards past him, and the non-stop noise of blaring horns, like hell’s own traffic, Kowalski is again violently grabbed and gripped by a hand that is even larger, and even more savage and powerful than the Guinea’s, whereby he is wrenched back and salvaged from the hopeless blind abyss.
“I never liked your pathetic ass…”
As he sits opposite him across an elegant coffee table, the Hunched Cornish indicates to Kowalski with his monster finger that he is welcome to as much of the coffee, or tea, in the alternative, as he wants, if he wants, as well as the chocolates and cookies to drink down with his hot beverage of choice, that he can shove into his stomach, which, the Cornish informs him, he’d punched free of the poison that Kowalski’d so dumbly accepted from the Guinea’s hand…
“… and you can also wash up, down that way… and then you can fucking leave…”
Kowalski slowly drinks some coffee. He puts a chocolate cookie into his mouth and crunches it with a hunger-sating sigh.
“Now, Smith, that’s a different story. I really liked that guy. Sometimes, I got the feeling he’d be making fun of me, when we’d have lunch somewhere, or dinner. But that’s okay, see. Because that was someone I could really talk to; tell him about my feelings, unload my problems…”
Kowalski pours himself more coffee, and takes a Ukrainian-made dark-chocolate-covered confection out of a box.
“But your kind of poetry – frankly, can’t stand it…”
The Hunched Cornish gets up and walks away.
Out on the street, Kowalski accidently notes the date on the phone of a man who, like Kowalski, is waiting for the light to change so that he can cross to the opposite corner.
“Is that really the day – March 15?”
“What does the phone say?” asks the man, as the light changes and he crosses the street, leaving Kowalski behind.
“I’ve been out… for two weeks?!”
Immediately, the journalist Kowalski’s thoughts race to The Curmudgeon: the newspaper where he’s been employed…
Saint Stephan, April 8, 2025