No author. No matter. Not the Half Guinea, in any case. How do I know? I simply do, and let’s just leave it at that. For what this irresponsibly authorless composition presents us with is far more valuable than the proper form, civil custom, and universally accepted procedure of signature, and that is…
For here we are offered a suggested glimpse of the Black Ferret – a shadowy menacing figure, it seems; a “darkly” noble mercenary of petty evil, a night-driven subterranean goblin of unfairness; a reversed and inverted cloak-and-dagger Pez Dispenser of injustice; a tragically foreshortened and limb-twisted fiend of unsubstantiated asseverations; a nigh-mythic half-legend half-spirit feverishly conjured out of the murky depths of Kyivan lore by frustrated babushkas, or through practiced witchery that maketh a magic marker ink stain jump to frightful life off scrap paper. To drive the fear of guilt and fault into the mind and heart of an innocent child, so that he tremble and shake inconsolably for a long time, or to simply make you think, by way of contemplation and shuddery reflection, upon the many earlier unimagined ways that will shape your inevitable demise.
And, mind you, we haven’t even seen him yet!
Except for that one time, thus far, anyway, in the framework series at the very top of Vol. 3 of The Kyiv Commix, titled, “The Clown Chronicles”, in which the Black Ferret appears, appropriately to those chronicles, inside the top story of a soaring gothic Soviet tower in the very heart of downtown Kyiv, as an outrageously and horrifically racist, race-baiting, race-grifting, N-word-eructing beast-clown; a vile, rubbery-lipped and revolting blackface minstrel of churning racial propaganda and filth-flinging provocation. A mentally sick and sexually depraved small black animal of utter contumely and vicious hatred. In short, a leftist.
Much like Ol’ Man Bammy, who never built anything, with his creepy graying, shrinking peanut-shaped head, freakish thickening voice, and weirdly wizening torso – although by comparison, the Black Ferret is, without question, the better speaker, commanding greater charisma and eloquence bolstered by superior natural elocution and doggedly developed presentation skills.
Is there then, perhaps, one Black Ferret split into two diametrically opposed vicious types – in Kyiv, that is?
Or do none of these characterizations even approximately describe the Black Ferret, do not relay to us his true nature, the essence of this troublesome and unattractive little dark thing?
Has any of the abovesaid perhaps unfairly maligned the Black Ferret, in the event that he is, in fact, a force for good, and all of these negatively connoted descriptions of him, knowing nothing else, have been no less, though also no more, than just plain RACIST!!!
Or are there two similar, yet respectively different, Black Ferrets terrorizing the capital? Or, maybe, there are several… Or even many Black Ferrets in the ancient Slavic city – you know… running around…???