Freaks and creeps are chagrined but helpless
Saint Stephan watches from his cage.
He’s seen it all a dozen times before – which is actually a factually true statement, because this time is the 13th.
It is the short, fat, square-assed figure of unbounded arrogance waddling up to the witness stand to testify against him, Zippy Zamazda. The Kyiv Poster newsroom employee who, within a month of being hired by Chief Editor Stephan, colluded with The Ferret to get Stephan fired and take his job.
While Stephan now laughs as he watches the deformity on the stand drone on and on about what a loser and alcoholic Stephan was, he still can’t get over how he’d hired him, gave him a job where he wouldn’t have had one otherwise, and a decent salary, and then how this squat compressed monstrosity, with all his hatred and all his arrogance and all his contempt, expressed in the insuppressible tremble of the upturned upper lip – and what else could it be if not a snarl? – went up to the publisher together with The Ferret to talk a bunch of shit about Stephan and get him fired.
And then taking that same job – the one that had been Stephan’s – and completely failing at it not three months later, the Kyiv Poster barely surviving the disaster in the wake of his leaving, the publisher’s finger pointing Zippy to the door, which hit him in the ass on his way out.
But the upshot of it is not this pathetic trial, which had somehow been reversed to make Stephan the defendant, rather than the absentee plaintiff and murder victim he’d started out as some years ago in the Expat Criminal Court of Kyiv, no…
The upshot is that this carnival sideshow freak, that Stephan, in his naivety and artlessness (well, okay, let’s face it: rather, in his shortsightedness and stupidity) had had the bad judgment to hire, now appends the title of “Former Chief Editor of the Kyiv Poster” to every fatuous opinion piece he submits to any news outlet moronic enough and desperate enough for copy to take it.
As if the three months he’d spent in a job he’d stolen and then failed at as Chief Editor of the Kyiv Poster had been the most important and impressive achievement of his entire life, the one he pins his reputation on.
And there it is again – Zippy Zamazda, on the stand, droning on and on, pushing its glasses slipping down on the greasy sweat back up onto the bridge of its potato bulb nose, pushing that squeaky coward voice through the hair-glutted nostrils of that same nose, casting its head presumptuously about (a repeated action originating in a severely unfounded feeling of superiority fatally coupled with a pathetically neurotic lack of confidence), the cocking of that same oversized (fat, actually) head up and to the side once all the presumptive casting about is, for the time being, done with (apparently as a way to look taller from such a far distance down), the unending vicious contempt – not just for Stephan, but for his fellowman.
He is still filled with rage, still livid with indignation that, although Stephan had given him the job, Stephan should have, by that very same gesture, become his superior, his boss, the one who gave him the orders and told him what he wanted him to do.
The upper lip is set atremble. It snarls upward as he gives his testimony – he cannot suppress it, he cannot hold it back and still it flat against the upper gum. The upper lip trembles and trembles with vicious self-righteous anger as he speaks. He doesn’t care. One can see that he is getting off on gushing out his testimony as though it were a cathartic sexual release long repressed. One can see it is making him very happy to say it all again, this depraved orgasm, as he’d done so many times before.
The snarkily grinning prosecutor no longer even has to ask the questions, for the testimony is absolutely perfect. Zippy Zamazda drones on and on and on…
“And plus, he’s arrogant!” Zippy fairly shouts into the court, his voice breaking.
“Could you elaborate that point, Zippy, be a tad more specific, to relay for the benefit of this court and all present a little more precisely what you mean,” asks the prosecutor smugly, flashing rows of sharp teeth in Stephan’s direction, as the court sucks in its breath and lets out a pleased collective shiver.
“Yes… ye-yeeess!!!” All worked up, Zippy raises pitch, shaking: “He was REALLY arrogant! I mean, he would, for example, when I was sitting there, he would, HE WOULD –”
Stephan rattles his cage and the testimony stops. Except for the stenographer, who continues to dutifully set the proceedings into the official record seemingly unmoved by the action, the courtroom ushers to a hush.
Stephan viciously kicks open the cage and rises from his bench. With slow but self-assured steps, he approaches the witness stand, his shackles and chains rattling about him.
Zamazda’s eyes widen and pull themselves toward the back of his head, like a sacrificial calf tethered by a short noose to a tree, sensing, filling with the terror of, its doom, as the bearded guy over there crouches and laughs, whetting his knife. Because of his unfortunate shape, Zamazda cannot turn much in the witness stand, and because of his blind panic, he is overcome by confusion and unable to comprehend a way out of the stand even though his instincts are telling him to run.
So he tries the old standby – to talk his way out of a pretty bad situation. He says: “Wait, let’s talk about this. I’m sure we can come to some sort of an agreement.”
“You’ve talked enough, Zamazda, and now you die…”
Stephan wraps his chains around Zamazda’s fat neck, causing the courtroom to gasp in horror and shock, but also spine-tingling titillation, as they see Zamazda’s fat blue tongue thrust out of his fat blue mouth and hear the wonderfully ghastly choking sounds as his eyes bulge out their sockets and he claws uselessly at the chains.
“How many times do I have to kill you before you finally fucking die…?!? Die, you scum, die!!!”
Stephan yanks the chain one final time, sending the echo of a cracking up through the shocked and pleased chamber, which begins to take on depth and height, adding floors with boxes and balconies, to resemble an opera house.
The dead arrogant-assed figure slumps and Stephan wrenches the corpse by its belt over the stand and onto the floor, under the feet of the stenographer, who dutifully continues recording the events without betraying the least surprise.
Stephan returns to the cage that had heretofore held him and slams the shackles against the bars, breaking them instantly and the chains that had bound him fall to his feet – like dead leaves from a tree.
He then turns to the chamber – arbitrarily scattered among the rising orchestra seats are the likes of The Ferret, Welsh Losser, Josh Davies sitting together, and a few others here and there.
There, farther back, is Boss Lard, and here, closer upfront is Animal Boy A. Plumb.
A few others include Sweaty Tank Top, Rico Soiree, Bret Boner and, once again, Zippy Zamazda.
Yet they are exhausted ghostly outlines and not the robust caricatures brimming with their particular brand of evil and delusion, who had insinuated their ways into Stephan’s life to a greater or lesser degree, thereby changing it, for the worse, and subsequently, whether they like it or not, for the better. Clearly, they don’t like it. Admittedly, a few hadn’t really touched his life at all. They just bugged him.
In the long tradition of Kyiv Unedited and Saint Stephan, their heads wobble and shake. Their eyes are wide in indignant surprise and go round and round, their mouths are rounded into shocked incensed O’s – all as if they are indeed surprised and shocked by Stephan’s freedom, but also furiously mocking it at the same time, helpless to change their future or his fate.
“I wasn’t on trial, you were!” Saint Stephan cries.
He looks at them – the feeble enervated heads keep shaking and shaking, the mouths open to shocked circles, the eyes going round and round.
“And you lost!”
He goes out a side exit, although he regrets just a little having to do so, as the inside of the theater has grown tempting in art, beautiful paintings covering the walls and dome inside swirling gold-gilt frames, spiraling columns all around, sculptures and busts, the glistening crystal of the chandelier, the tantalizing lights, and all that exquisite craftsmanship, the decoration and the beguiling detail, so exponentially patterned and endlessly intricate as to be implausible.
To be continued
Filed by Jack Step, CTFSA, April 30, 2016, Orthodox Easter Saturday