Wolf is a wolf to man
When his eyes open, he stares at the mantelpiece, but does not immediately comprehend Josh Davies’s head is missing.
He slowly surveys the wreckage of his toppled bookcase and the hundreds of volumes all about his feet and spread over the living room floor, bindings broken, sheaves of pages mangled or torn.
All his CDs – crashed, with many shattered, and scattered in a maelstrom of malice across the floor. The player, broken.
“The head?”
He looks up at the mantelpiece and for the first time realizes Josh Davies is gone.
Moving for the first time in nearly 24 hours, he goes out on the balcony. The door from the balcony into the living room will need to be replaced. The balcony had been scaled and battered open from the courtyard – not all, but most of the windows smashed. And now he also sees the shards of broken pottery that had held his flowers and plants all across the deck. The plants are torn up and dying. The earth that had been their sustenance is spread in heaps and mounds across the deck commixed with the shards.
In that earth, shoeprints – two sets.
He’d know the tread of the one shoe anywhere – Italian.
“The Half Guinea…”
But the other one – he doesn’t know… His memory turns up two lemons and a turd, and it unsettles him. And it’s not so much the shoeprint that looks or feels strangely familiar, but rather the strange feeling he gets just by looking down at it, just by it’s being there, imprinted in his dirt, trespassing his ground, violating his space, carrying some ill-wishing being into his home to destroy things around him that he loves that are his, yet remaining willfully unknown. He doesn’t know; he can’t place it. His sense of foreboding is heavy, unnerving.
He moves back into the living room.
Someone’s eaten his brownie – and not just the one that’d been waiting for him next to the pot of coffee on the coffee table in front of his armchair, but the half-eaten one on the end table to the left of his armchair as well; both, now gone.
He picks up the pot off the ceramic tile and feels its weight. He whirls it in small circles and the cold coffee still left inside sloshes around – apparently untouched since the little he’d gotten to drink yesterday, and it would appear the intruders didn’t bother giving it a try.
“Fucking assholes.”
He remembers how good that coffee was, but he does not now want to make some more – it just wouldn’t be the same. And besides, his brownies are gone.
*
The Hunched Cornish is in The Checkout kitchen, somewhere in Kyiv’s bohemian yet quickly gentrifying district of Podil.
“Hey, Hunchie – ha!”
“Fucking Guinea…”
“Hey, what’s all the bad will about, Hunchboy?”
“There’s no bad will, Guinea. But why couldn’t you just take the head? Why did you have to trash my apartment?”
“Trash your apartment? You mean, for example, like crash through your balcony with a secret accomplice, knock down all your fucking plants, break your balcony door into your pristine living room, accidently on purpose knock over your huge but not-wall-mounted bookshelf, littering your floor with hundreds of volumes of useless books as well as your vast CD collection of cringe-inducing music – except, of course, for the Vivaldi (nothing beats ‘The Four Seasons’, heh-heh) – and accidently break the CD player you play it all on?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not my MO.”
“Well, okay. Who were you with?”
“I wasn’t with anybody, because I already told you I don’t know anything about it and if it was anyone, it wasn’t me.”
“Hmm…”
“Hey, Hunchie – know what a pooka is?”
“Damn you to Hell, Guinea!”
“It’s too late for that!”
The Half Guinea goes into the fridge and takes out the components of what will soon be a delicious roast beef sandwich between two pieces of rye bread with seeds.
“I only use Hellmann’s for this one, Hunchie – simply the best. You know, like they sang in the commercials on the TV… aaahh… ‘Bring out the Hellmann’s and bring out the best…’ Sometimes I like to stir in some mustard, but it doesn’t really matter what kind. How about you?”
Manny Face, June 7, 2016