“Heh – right now, I’m heading toward my favorite niche, which is a really small café and bagel joint in the corner of the building adjoining the central synagogue…
“Except…
“Aaahh… yeah, anyway, it’s too complicated and time-consuming for me to explain, unless I draw you a picture, which isn’t an option, but even if it was, I wouldn’t do it heh…”
But as The Ferret gets there, his beloved spot – “Where I’m both inconspicuous and conspicuous at the same time, heh-heh-heh…” – has vanished…
“But how can this be?!”
It had been the diminutive bench, shoved up against the ledge of the little café’s storefront window making a set with its tiny table companion that The Ferret fell in love with no sooner than he’d seen them, oh, so way back long ago, with his very first and heartfelt thought being: ‘Heh, this spot was made just for me!’
But now, everything has changed, and The Ferret experiences rage and despair.
“No, no, no, noooo!!! Heh-heh-heh-heh!!!”
For no one but The Ferret, from his own Ferret-headed churnings, could ever have construed these objects as anything more than decorative and whimsical outdoor add-ons to New York Bagel.
These objects might physically accommodate small yapping performance dogs playing at circus tea or a number of those multi-colored tiny lawn dwarves creative American suburbanites enjoy strategically potting around their lawns, behind bushes and such, illuminating them with cheap five-and-dime store floodlights, to add a touch of fairytale surprise for their children and select guests wending up the walks to their front doors at night, but surely, no one was ever meant to actually SIT there – except, of course, for The Ferret.
“Heh – to do important investigative and maybe even award-winning journalism work on my laptop, heh-heh-heh…”
But now – “This ruins everything: the ambience, the mood-setting power, the negative capability, a few other things – gone – all gone, gone, gone!!!”
For New York Bagel has been transformed into some other place – The Ferret does not get the name, but it doesn’t matter… ruined, ruined, ruined… the café-front window replaced by a coffee bar that opens up onto the sidewalk.
On the sidewalk itself, the new coffee shop offers a cluster of seating under a large umbrella… and The Ferret, in a desperate effort to recreate his non-existent spot, begins to viciously pull a chair from the cluster with one claw, his little laptop pack swinging frantically from a humped shoulder, while dragging out one of the tables with the other claw, the legs of both scraping and rattling across the sidewalk, drawing immediate attention to The Ferret’s fury.
“… heh… heh… heh… heh…”
“Hey, you – stop that!” the barista barkeep needless to say jumps out to easily disarm The Ferret of the shop’s property and quickly replaces it where it was…
… and now The Ferret stands stock still and fixed to the spot, in front of the coffee bar, where he’d been halted, his greenish lips curled back in a noxious leer and but a minor annoyance to passersby as they skirt and skip around him.
Clouds darken the sky and it begins to rain…
People desert the streets for shelter, ducking into the Metro, odd passages and doorways, as the rain soon pours down in unremitting torrents.
Drops of polluted water crown the tips of The Ferret’s pointed ears.
And so he, The Ferret, suffers it, the moment, endlessly, like a recurring nightmare from which he can’t awaken.
Except, as the sky darkens even more with approaching evening, far behind him and kitty-corner from the synagogue, a very large Orthodox Jew takes two steps back and then charges forward and launches off the curb, leaping high-high into Kyiv’s drenched sooty night air.
He lands with a huge splash next to The Ferret and with a shocking deftness of his rubbery giant fingers in a single nonstop movement very precisely thrusts a piece of paper into The Ferret’s left jacket pocket. Momentum unbroken, with a bellow he saunters off on long hydroplaning ballet-like strides, gliding away faster and faster into the vanishing point of the street and the rest of the great yawning night.
Filed by Saint Stephan. Undated