The Hunched Cornish hunts for early spring flowers in the lower Kyiv hills above Podil; The Half Guinea hatches his unsavory plan to morally and physically debase Commix Girl; and in between we learn some history
Kyiv is built on hills – seven, to be exact, like all famous cities – and is hidden among trees.
For all he, or anyone, knows, The Hunched Cornish is walking over long-buried ruins of a site devastated by the Mongols, or possibly some 70 years earlier by the Finno-Ugric and Kipchak Andrey Bogolyubsky, with whom Russian history properly begins. It’s a good thing he’s a saint for those people, who, even today, The Hunched Cornish reflects, resemble their fierce forefather to frightening degree.
He is comically short. Pasty-faced with green overtones and grotesquely livid lips. Congenitally weak legs bend and bow outward under an over-heavy barrel-shaped torso. Due to its great weight, the oversized head wobbles on a short neck stub… Two of his trusted henchmen carry Bogolyubsky from a cart and hoist him up on a small horse, keeping him propped on his mount from either side so he doesn’t topple over. Now, in breathless unrestrained glee, through slanted eyes, Bogolyubsky takes in the great spectacle from atop one of the seven hills of the tragic Rus capital – of the streets running with the blood of the city’s flesh; of his Oriental horde laying waste to the Byzantine Heir, which has rejected him.
The sad vision from the past flickers above him and with his mind The Hunched Cornish closes it shut. He stands deathly still in the trees and begins to turn blue with fire. Smoke thickens and rises as the ground cover around him catches flame.
‘The Third Rome my Minoan asshole,’ The Cornish seethes to himself. “The Half Guinea can go fuck himself,” he finally adds out loud, exhaling with relief and reacquiring the lightness of spirit with which he had initially roamed into this hillside wood just above Kyiv’s Podil in pursuit of a favorite early spring pastime – the gathering of snowdrops and other wild blooms he might happen upon growing amid the large wide-spaced trees, for his vases at home.
The Cornish quickly stamps his fire down.
*
Some small distance away in the grid-crossed streets of Podil itself, Commix Girl is looking intensely at a framed photograph she keeps under the counter of her new café, which she has just opened for business. She brings the photograph closer to her face, as if to peer into it, as if to will the photograph to give up some answers.
The year is 1999. In the photograph, she is a one-year-old tot, laughing as her handsome young father holds her aloft, her beautiful young mother at their side. The three of them are smiling, laughing. They are standing on a dirt road in front of the back of a maroon-colored car, as if they’d been out on a trip somewhere and were taking a break. The sky above them is the bluest blue with not a cloud in it. Behind them is a field, and far, far beyond the field, a line of trees.
Her parents are murdered.
When the police identify the killers from the bloody palm and finger prints taken from the body and salon of the maroon car, they stop the investigation into the double murder and seal the files, marking the case closed. It is no longer their business.
The orphaned little girl is adopted by a top U.S. diplomat posted to Kyiv and his wealthy wife. They become her other parents… her second parents… her new replacement mom and dad.
Commix Girl looks at the photo and reflects on everything she does not know, on everything she imagines could have been but never was. She understands how incredibly lucky she is. She closes her eyes. She shudders. Commix Girl is very, very grateful.
*
As her first customer finally walks in, Commix Girl opens her eyes and replaces the photograph back under the counter, but seeing the oily visitor she is immediately repulsed. Then she recognizes The Half Guinea – the swarthy Mediterranean features, a crazed look, his thick lips broken by an insinuating jagged-toothed leer.
He’s dragging enough grease behind him that Commix Girl worries others will slip and fall as they walk in.
The Guinea cocks his head to the side and rolls a shoulder to make as though he’s going for a table under one of the café’s large street-front windows, but then swerves sharply toward Commix Girl.
As The Guinea engages Commix Girl in aggressive but clever verbiage in what to Commix Girl laughably looks like an oafish attempt to woo her, Commix Girl believes she is doing quite well holding her own against the slippery Guinea, verbally parrying his every thrust and beating him into submission so that he either sits at a table and orders a coffee or leaves.
But the only verbal parrying Commix Girl is doing is in her mind, for the underhanded, sex-crazed, despicable Guinea, who typically makes sport of sexually victimizing black chicks, has cast Commix Girl under his spell.
Commix Girl stands immobile. Her lips are parted, but she utters not a sound. And while she stares straight ahead, in his wicked craft The Guinea has contrived to make it look as though Commix Girl is gazing limpidly into his eyes with all her youthful hunger… for sex… if only for his own egotistical pleasure…
The Half Guinea’s laughing. With his right elbow propped against the counter for leverage, he is pulling Commix Girl’s head toward his by the hair. He is laughing and taking his time. Slowly, forcefully, overpoweringly, enjoyably, by physical increments he pulls Commix Girl by the hair toward his face, toward his big, wet, sexually insatiable lips. He is laughing and laughing.
“What’s the matter, Guinea, not enough black girls in this town for you?”
Still clutching Commix Girl’s hair, The Guinea turns.
“Hunchee – hey, Hunchee, Hunchee ha!”
But The Guinea’s voice wavers, its irrepressible self-assurance, its unbridled cockiness, gone.
Incredibly, The Cornish not only darkens the entire doorway with his entrance, but blocks out almost all the light coming through the windows. He looks at The Guinea. He’s turning bluer.
The Guinea lets go of the hair and Commix Girl shakes her head back into the conscious present, completely aware of what had just almost happened and with both hands shoves The Guinea hard from across the counter, forcing him into a sidewise stumble toward The Cornish. The Guinea looks at The Cornish.
“If you ever come in here again, I’ll rip your fucking head off. And when I do it, Guinea, it will stay ripped off.”
The Cornish steps to the side of the door and The Guinea sweeps by. Copies of a petition that Commix Girl had made up to shut down the Hasidic Strip Bar across the street fly off the counter in the wake of The Guinea’s leaving. In this bohemian yet quickly gentrifying district of Podil, Commix Girl believes the Hasidic Strip Bar is a blight on the neighborhood and she doesn’t need it. She recognizes and knows The Hunched Cornish for who he is.
Awkwardly, silently, he gives her the bunch of snowdrops* he’d been clutching in his fist and turns to leave. It was a gesture of good will, not desire, and at that moment, under the circumstances, and after what has just transpired, The Hunched Cornish believes it to be a right, and a nice, thing to do. He can always go back into the low hills a stone’s throw from here and get more flowers for his vases at home – and that’s exactly what he is about to do.
But for more than one reason the gesture warms Commix Girl’s heart, but mostly because she knows that The Cornish had been in the hills nearby collecting them for his own household vases.
“Say, Mr. Cornish, you mean you’re not even going to stay for a cup of coffee?”
The Cornish stops in mid-step but then restarts his movement toward the door.
“Oh, come on, Mr. Cornish. You’d be my first customer!”
Again, The Cornish stops, but again begins his slow movement out.
“But Mr. Cornish – the coffee’s on the house!”
The Cornish stops. He stands in place for a while – a long while… He turns toward a table under one of the café’s big street-front windows, puts two chairs together, and sits down.
* Utter nonsense. We, The KUSEB, have it on authority that the “snowdrops” are actually lilies of the valley, which The Cornish habitually confuses with snowdrops, he’d illegally torn out of a Podil monastery flower bed.
Filed by Jack Step, CTFSA, April 27, 2016