Brief reprieve from the tortuous Clown Chronicles, continued
Now, as he grew, The Ferret began noticing changes to his body. He was not sure they were good changes, but each time he examined them closely and tested their functions, he would conclude with his particular brand of FERRET joy that the changes were all good.
“Hey, this is really good, heh-heh…”
One day, for example, he found tadpole legs hanging down from his hips when he flung his puppet pants off to shit. And the very next day, cloven hooves had replaced his feet.
“Heh – the tadpole legs give me a confident wishbone bounce, while the hooves have unexplainable suction action that allows me to walk perpendicularly straight up vertical structures, like the walls of buildings – even if they’re made from glass…”
On yet another day, his back was replaced by a turtle shell.
“Heh – now I can fall countless stories from tall glass buildings and land on my back without anything happening to me.”
And on still another, the corners of the shell were graced with a pair of retractable batwings…
“… that actually work! Now I can fly short distances at will and bound up to the crossbeams and rafters inside unsuspecting stage theaters. And while the wings aren’t big enough to counteract a fall, nevertheless nothing will happen to me, because I’ll still land on my turtle shell back – heh-heh…”
In a short time, as his neck sunk down into the shell, the shell became adorned with a line of rat-like fur running straight down the middle.
“Heh-heh – that’s to make me handsome.”
And last but not least, his hands turned into a pair of mammalian dirt-burrowing claws.
“Now no one will fuck with me, because I’m totally dangerous…”
“Well, heh,” The Ferret continued, “this should dispel any foolish notions that I was created by Josh Davies…”
But The Ferret didn’t know that those notions weren’t foolish at all, for Josh Davies had indeed created him. And while Davies implanted the retractable batwings and suction-action cloven hooves, he also implanted false memories into The Ferret’s brain, so that he’d never remember the harrowing experience of being abducted by Davies in a sack and then carved to pieces as part of a USAID-funded project gone awry.
And so, when he reached the age of 25, The Ferret ran away from home.
“Fuck being a hockey player and a doctor – heh, heh, heh. I’m going to Ukraine…”
When he reached the land of his purported ancestors, using the money his father had given him for medical school, he joined the Kyiv Poster, Ukraine’s only English-language news rag, initially as a sportswriter and quickly growing from there.
The years rolled by and The Ferret perfected the art of getting his colleagues fired while making himself seem indispensable to the operation.
But all of the drinking and maneuvering eventually caught up with The Ferret, until one day, as he backpedaled himself into a corner of the newsroom with no way out and nowhere else to turn, he was fired himself.
“Heh – you didn’t hear that from me…”
So where is The Ferret today?
He is sitting alone in a basement bar in downtown Kyiv – drinking; reflecting on his midlife; except there is only one problem with that: as you know from an earlier episode, The Ferret had willingly lost his ability to reflect and think in moral terms when he allowed himself to turn into the treacherous scheming backpedaling underhanded twofaced manipulative backstabbing freak that he is. Thus, instead of reflecting, as he gets red-eyed with drink, he sort of briefly entertains fleeting images of moments in his life that never really occurred as they first pass in and then back out of his feeble and shrinking mind.
“Dude, you must be paranoid. Heh.”
And he’s calling no one on the phone; nor anyone him. His contacts have dried up and he is no longer able to hook gullible suckers with inside information he’d simply made up. By now, people have gotten wise to his tricks and want no part of him anymore.
With all the pain and hardship he’d caused others for the sake of his own assured safety and advancement, he’s made no impact, has had no effect on the world, except that the people he’s hurt have gone on to surpass him. Nothing has really changed because of him, but he’s changed, and continues to do so, visibly turning into a large rat (as preprogrammed years earlier by Josh Davies) as we read this and as he sits there in the basement bar, getting drunk, receding out of the minds of people and further and further into irrelevance and non-existence.
For, you see, FERRET, one doesn’t have to be especially smart, or attractive, or talented to shoot into the night sky and blaze there for one brief glorious moment like a wonderful star before exploding into a million burning shards of light come raining in cascading arcs back down to Earth, now extinguished in their beauty, and beautiful in their death, where they belong.
FERRET, the only thing one really needs for this – is heart.
And The Ferret is actually writing a letter – perhaps even the first one ever of his life.
He’s clacking away on a little laptop as his mammalian ground-digging claws turn definitively into a rat’s paws, writing to Welsh Losser, saying:
‘Dear Welsh Losser, Please leave that big Negro in Mississippi – I don’t care if he’s loveable or not. Come back to Kyiv, your home, where you belong – with me.’
The Ferret wants to add, ‘my life means nothing here without you,’ but as has been implied, he doesn’t have the heart.
But FERRET, you need not bother, for I will tell you: Your life means nothing anyway.
Filed April 11, 2015