An unfinished testimonial submitted to the Obituary Section by the offices of the Hunched Cornish
In the heart of the modern-day medieval metropolis, once hailed as the center of East Slavic civilization, a meeting of two minds is underway.
One man, square-jawed and clench-toothed, sits hunched under a tangle of soiled sheets and a threadbare blanket, his wild eyes webbed with bright red veins. His hat has been holstered over the bed post. One of his wingtip shoes is on his foot, untied, while the other lies on its side, a stone’s throw across the small ward in a hospital for the criminally insane.
“I hear you just fine, Dirk, and understand you even better, which isn’t, of course, to say that I believe a word that you have said.”
The head remains hidden under the blankets, but with the room now growing dim, the face has taken on a pallid gleam, looking more like a thin death mask than the features of a living, breathing man. Some dark strands of hair stick out from under the pea-green blanket as if clutching the mask in place.
The man standing has cupped his large earth-brown hands around a wooden matchstick, now burst into a pale-yellow flame that invokes an assembly of ghostly shadows across the walls of the ward. They waver and recoil to every undulation of the flame as it dances laughingly atop the matchstick.
“People lie – not just sometimes to a particular purpose, but very often to confirm their disdain for the truth, which hurts so much that it’s often impossible to live with.”
Dirk’s head appears to jerk upward under the covers. Otherwise, the ward is still, save for the increasingly animated shapes along its walls. They dance in silence. Their audience of the anxiety-afflicted, comatose, and maniacal seems sedated as the curtains slowly close on another day beyond the institution’s small high windows.
The Half Guinea smiles, in that Mediterranean sort of way that at once evokes compassion and yet a coming betrayal, a knife stuck in the back during the warmest of embraces, Brutus to Caesar, from antiquity down through the ages. Dickerson sees it coming but hardly flinches.
“Have you ever heard the story of Orpheus Ferret.”
There’s no answer from under the blanket.
“They called him a bard, a poet, and even a prophet. But that doesn’t mean he told the truth.”
A cloud of white smoke fills the air from a thin opening between the Half Guinea’s moist purple lips, which curl into a smile, revealing a neat row of small but perfectly straight teeth.
“In fact, he was a journalist of some repute, if one can use that word with regard to that profession. In any case, just like his namesake of 2,000 years earlier, he went straight to hell after his time here on Earth.”
One of the patients, who’d been hiding beneath the collapsed springs of his steel-framed bed, has now poked one eye out from under the mattress that hangs down from the bed onto the floor like a makeshift lean-to shed.
The Guinea appears to notice this, but continues to keep his dark eyes fixed upward over the head of Dickerson, as if addressing a larger audience in some invisible distance.
“He didn’t stop off on the way to receive final judgment for his lifetime of sins, most of which, again, like so many others, consisted of outrageous assaults on the truth. Instead, he somehow managed to weasel his way into the underworld and thus bypass the otherwise inevitable encounter of mortal man with the harsh reality of his own truth. At least that’s what he thought.”
The patient under the bed has now revealed his full face, contorted into such strange and hideous contours that his nose seems to point down into a dark and gaping mouth, while the eyebrows tangle together over his eye sockets like a thicket surrounding some isolated human dwelling long abandoned by its former inhabitants.
“To be sure, he exercised a certain charm, but people believe what they want to believe, be it their own lies or someone else’s.”
Another of the ward’s inhabitants has now sat up in his bed to listen in while mindlessly picking his nose.
“But that didn’t prevent him from being dispatched from this world by, of all things, a writer of verse, in what can only be called poetic justice.”
An air-raid siren can be heard in the distance, getting louder in spurts until eventually working itself up into a full-blown howl, like some great beast, angered at being awakened, anguished at some threat looming over the horizon.
The madmen of the ward join in on the cry, until a chorus of deep-throated pain shatters the silence emplaced over them in the name of societal sanity.
Far from put off by the madness unleashed around him, the Guinea’s face brightens, beaming red above the embers at the end of the cigarette he holds close to his mouth.
“For in the Ferret’s heart of lies, a fear grew cold as a stone.
His words lashed out like lightning strikes, his arms flailed in the air.
But in the storm before the clash, he sought without a fight,
Kowalski held if not quite strong against the dwindling light.
“Uncertain but defiant, unyielding to despair.
Not like the noble Paris, on whom the gods had shone.
He sent the Ferret to his death, right there upon the street.
The Poet slayed the liar, who fell before his feet.”
The ward, silent again, grows bright along the walls. The shadows that had been dancing now throb in a manic frenzy, as flames engulf one bed after another.
From beyond the asylum’s walls, a great light stretches up into the dark abyss that is the skyline of wartime Kyiv after curfew.
Nowhere else is a light to be seen, and the howl of the sirens goes silent.
Filed Oct. 24, 2022