“Are you Welsh Losser?”
“No… no, NOOOO!”
The room grows silent, then dark, as if nobody’s there.
When illumination resumes, the strangely familiar scene of The Checkout kitchen takes hold over the eye of at least one dedicated reader of Kyiv Unedited.
There’s the smooth white surface of a stove with its thick glass temperature dial; a faded porcelain sink over large wooden cupboard drawers; a small, freshly scrubbed breakfast table on a black-and-white checkered floor with a spurt of mustard splashed near a table leg.
And against all this, effectively constituting the entire backdrop to an otherwise innocuous, almost friendly, vaguely familial stage setting (for what else could this be but a collection of props awaiting the arrival of actors and audience to enliven and resuscitate its contents) is a door with no light on the other side.
A mangy pooch in black sunglasses enters the kitchen through this door, hops onto a chair at the table and then produces a newspaper whose pages it commences to peruse.
“Tell me you’re Welsh Losser or I’ll kill you,” resumes the voice from the dark on the other side of the door.
The sounds of slapped skin and cracked bone, ‘ughs’ and ‘ahs’, frightened gasps, a heaving chest and shrieks cut short by rapid but irregular thumps into heavy solid flesh. A chair scrapes against exhausted floor boards.
The door swings open again and the reader immediately recognizes the swarthy Mediterranean figure of The Half Guinea, his rough-hewn face contorted into a grimace on its way to a smile, his bow legs jutting beneath a faded pair of bottle-green corduroy trousers, the three-quarter-length black leather jacket swings open with his every stride.
In bold black print on the front page of the dog’s newspaper reads: “Josh Davies Found Dead in Flat”
But The Guinea has halted center-kitchen, his middle-aged frame in a slight squat, his eyes upon an audience that must be there beyond the blinding light that floods his proscenium-framed reality.
“Are you Welsh Losser?” he barks into the light.
His eyes are crazed, his mouth wet, his hands hung limp at his sides.
A peal of laughter resounds, prolonged thunder, cruel in its incessancy, indifferent to a thousand silent prayers for it to stop.
But it does stop, as if swallowed by the wall of white light acting as a shield for hundreds of faceless onlookers, seeing but remaining unseen, indifferent to each other but riveted to the drama unfolding before them.
“Shall I release The Hunched Cornish?” shouts The Guinea, drunken-faced and teary-eyed, into the light.
“Kill him,” says John Smith, who’s seated in front of his home computer with the Kyiv Unedited website prominently opened on his screen.
The text of the piece Smith is reading on the site just ends there, as if the writer failed to complete it, and Smith is angry.
So he closes the site, shuts off his computer and decides to go hunt down a ham and cheese sandwich.
But, alas, woe to you, city of Kyiv, where every place is closed no sooner than its doors had been flung open, with stupid music blared onto car-clogged streets, and bright red balloons stuck to the storefront windows, and the fresh-faced shop girls acting so nice that first day or two…
But, but, as soon as someone like John Smith, Kyiv-based detective, is hungry and wants to satisfy an all too understandable urge to shove a ham and cheese sandwich into his face, sate his hunger, soothe his usually well-disguised aggression, relax after a long day’s work chasing down freaks, perverts, murderers, and especially all the lying, sneaky, self-promoting losers who infest the city’s expatriate community, he can’t find a fucking sandwich place… that is to say, one that he knows, trusts and thus has already patronized.
But that’s not what’s got him ticked. Not Smith, the young professional, handsome and dashing in his light-gray suit and fedora. He’s got the world in front of him, not even thirty and already a detective first class.
Sure, his fiancee was recently brutally murdered and the Old Man has been acting strange – as if he might not continue to promote Smith’s stellar career accomplishments.
But at least Smith isn’t a maniac in endless matrimonial acrimony – like Dickerson… or a drunken porn addict like Step.
No, no, dear readers of Kyiv Unedited, whoever you are and for whatever reason you continue to visit this site. Smith is a man with a plan, going places fast… if only just this moment to a modestly priced and properly administered sandwich shop.
‘So, Davies is dead,’ thinks Smith as he prowls lunchtime Podil in search of a suitable eatery.
‘That’s the last person I expected to see knocked off – despite the glaring fact that Davies’s head turned up on the far end of The Hunched Cornish’s fishing pole way back when: That was some kind of time warp, a warning of what could and maybe would be if Davies didn’t change his ways.’
In support of this line of reasoning, Smith recalls how in more recent episodes of The Commix, Davies is described as defending his much younger wife against the lascivious advances of the so-called False Dmitry, who is said to be impersonating Saint Stephan, an idiot from the Ukrainian Diaspora whose activities were interesting enough to follow before he was reported to have murdered Zippy Zamazda in a court of law and then hightailed it to California where he supposedly enjoys a warm friendship with Nicolas Cage.
Smith stops on the corner of Mizhigorska and Vedenska, midway between the Zhovten Cinema and the synagogue to light a smoke, sneer at passing shitckickers, and curse the bag-toting hags who bump him as they go around him.
It’s precisely when the Finno-Ugric faker Dmitry entered the plot of The Kyiv Commix that things stopped making sense, thinks Smith.
“He must have killed Davies… he’s trying to derail the plot, erase its seemingly meaningless course of events. This is fake news, historical revision. War, a Russian invasion is on the way,” he shouts, and then is pushed toward the curb by a family of four with a stroller and bags of Christmas gifts and food.
December 29, 2017
Filed in part, no doubt, for approacheth the New Year. But filed by whom? Well, we’ll just move along now and see what happens below; shall we? That is, now that all of the formalities have been met. Well, almost all of them, in any case… Aye, formalities – so seemingly trivial, and yet, so #!&%*$! IMPORTANT!!! – for they make ALL the difference, and vive la that, Jack…
*
“Well, I came home to find a corpse on the floor. And to my surprise, it was myself.”
“No kidding.”
“Nor exaggeration either. You see, I’d recently thrown out a despicable excuse of a man, whom the readers of your publication have come to know as ‘The False Dmitry’.”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. But I’ll be damned if someone makes me into a cuckhold.”
“You may be damned, anyway, with your head having been cut off multiple episodes back and now dead as a doornail in a floorboard of your own flat.”
“That’s the way it would appear. Anyway, Dmitry had been a guest in my home, a modestly furnished flat on Red Army Street, where I live with my lovely long-legged blonde architect wife. Although it’s not really clear who’d invited him.”
“Yeah, go on.”
“So I catch him peeping at her while she’s asleep and toss him out the same way he’d come in.”
“And which way was that? I mean, you just said you didn’t know how he came to be a guest in your home, and it’s certainly not clear from the reporting on this site. Couldn’t it be the case that that wife of yours, many years your junior as far as I can tell, invited him in?”
“I suppose so.”
“And couldn’t it also be the case – we’re just speaking hypothetically here – that the alleged peeping tom…”
“Not alleged. I caught him in the act.”
“That this man was really Stephan, a ghost of a figure for so many years on the pages of this fair Internet publication, who we now know is capable of murder (i.e., the barehanded strangulation of Zippy Zamazda before a court of law), and thus certainly not above voyeurism and maybe even worse.”
“You’re referring to Saint Stephan?”
“I guess. You see, in this age of fake news, identity theft and Internet character assassination before the truth has time to put on its pants, I don’t believe in personal metamorphoses. If Dmitry dresses and knows the same people as Saint Stephan, then the chances are next to certain that the two are one and the same.”
“But…”
“But you cannot or do not want to believe that that left-bank loser, whom you took into your care in 1995, rescuing him from the steps of this city’s central post office, where he’d been waiting to receive his next handout by mail after failing miserably to make it as a high-flying and sexually attractive expatriate…”
“And…”
“And now this very same man – who many believe may be one of the original founders of this website that we have been blessed or cursed to be now interacting on – supposedly traipsed off to California and seamlessly entered into a friendship with Nicolas Cage while a lookalike was peeking in on your wife…”
Josh Davies is still. His large round eyes stone-cold and staring up at the ceiling.
To be continued
January 10, 2018
January 10, January 10 – yeah, that’s great. Except for one thing: You’re supposed to file the story WITH YOUR NAME ON IT!!!
Why? I’ll tell you why: Because as soon as you file the story, it is no longer YOUR property, but it belongs to us, with all of the fame and wealth potentially appertaining thereto that it might bring.
However, should we get sued for, say, defamation of character, because of YOUR story, then the RESPONSIBILITY for it falls back on YOU.
That’s the way the modern world works. Capitalism, and all that. And if you don’t like it, then GET OUT! Bucko.