I need no gun. I need no knife or any contrivance of man. No implements, no needles, no inventions. I need no fists.
I cracked his glasses lens with my beak and he fell down, hit his head, and died.
And then I pecked a gash in his mouth, to get some blood running, for dramatic effect.
Caw…
I cracked his glasses lens with my beak, because that is my specialty – if I can’t stop the ears of men, to prevent their hearing, then at least I can blind them, so that they can’t see.
You would admire my shiny collection of eyeballs if I brought you to the secret place where I hide them. You would be impressed.
Naïve and boy-like Steve Kowalski was right. Woo’s weak little heart exploded from the shock of me.
Do you think it was so hard for me to get Dickerson to open the kitchen window and let me in?
And if I struck Woo in the kitchen, where he fell, how did he end up in the only other room in the flat, you ask?
You fools! You’re as simple as was my kill – a little rook taking out a highly, if somewhat underhandedly, educated Chinaman, widowing his fake wife and half-orphaning his phony kids. Just see the picture of them posing before a secret Chinese toxic waste dump – the photo that was displayed so proudly on his office desk. All for show, to fool his visitors, his patients, his sex trafficked prey.
See it, see it, for the lies!
Caw!
Woo fell in the kitchen, and I told Dickerson, I said:
“Dirk, if you want more room in this little one-room flat for yourself, you’d better move the body to that very room.”
And so, lifting the troublesome Sino-corpse under its arms, he dragged it but a short way (for there is not that far to go in his little place), and simply let it drop in that other room, where it crumpled into a mound of lab coat, checkered pants, and shoes that were more like slippers.
And then, in his socks and underwear, Dickerson returned to the kitchen, where he got back down on his hands and knees, and where, tortured of mind, he was made to further suffer a second unexpected visit – from one John Smith…
And then everything would go black for Dirk. Because Smith is an excellent, and eager, and willing disciple and charge.
I have wanted to be his friend, that Dirk Dickerson submit to me.
When I call him an ape, it’s for his own good. And I tell him to get up. “Get up, get up,” I say, “for you are not a slave!”
Caw!
It was me who drove Dirk to the insane asylum, time after time.
And it was me who showed him how to jerry-rig a window inside the bin for easy escapes.
For whatever reason, he pulls the world around him in on himself, like a vortex, like a black hole, and it breaks apart and crumbles in upon him.
I can’t deny I like that; but am I the agent of his self-destruction, or does he simply make it easy for me to come in?
He pulls destruction in toward him. He calls it all upon himself.
He cries out in prayer, but the other voice, the one further and deeper inside him, laughs and curses mockingly over his pleas to be considered.
That voice is so loud, it paralyzes, and he will swear it comes not from within, but from somewhere else, some other source, outside.
And in the end, he will tell you that mocking and laughing voice is me.
Me! Can you imagine? I can’t even talk – caw, caw, caw…
And so o’er it, no control.
He wants us, you and I, to identify some unquantifiable space for him from which his torments come. Rush screaming in at him, and into his head.
The compassionate believe him, or say they do, but he is beyond able to value having such one or two true friends.
He feels, finally realizing it, that he’s not lived to have earned salvation, by yearning toward the flaming source and sun of his life; and thus, his still-living hell is not measured by that opposite fire, but in gauges and computations of freezing cold and burning ice.
I have told you all this to increase your knowledge, and to open your eyes.
For, as the scriptures say:
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being my priests; and since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children”.
And also:
“Where there is no vision, the people perish”.
And all I ask of you is that you never say I am of no consequence.
Caw…
Filed by Saint Stephan, Fall Equinox Eve, September 21, 2025