It is just after four o’clock and dead-winter darkness has fallen upon war-embattled Kyiv.
Steve Kowalski, who loiters outside the secret and undisclosed offices of Kyiv Unedited media publications and its flagship Kyiv Commix news and detective agency services, somewhere in the heart of the beaten-down city’s once quickly-gentrifying and ancient district of Podil, has just been fired from the place, around lunchtime, after having filed only a handful of reports under the penname The Rational Man.
It was largely due to these reports, and quite possibly a few other reasons we will only later be able to educationally guess at, that Kowalski got the ax today, following aggressive demands from at least one of The Commix’x Union Jokers, who abstractly and in powerful summary-outline manner, revealed to the Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board what was wrong with Steve’s work from the get-go; namely, its invariably blatant awfulness and embarrassingly cringy badness, and not even in so many words – a thing that had been obvious to everyone there (which is to say, here), but no one, other than the Joker in question, had had the guts to admit.
For color, I will tell you that Kowalski is wearing his durable, decent-quality, and greatly cherished Sherpa-lined Billy the Kid navy-blue corduroy jacket passed down to him from his cousin Victor, warmed up underneath by a thick and not untasteful cable-knit sweater from Aunt Agatha in Hamtramck, Michigan, while atop his length-long cranium bounces the pompom of his 100 percent acrylic Detroit Lions light-blue and metallic-gray knit winter hat, the team’s iconic blue lion lunging and roaring fiercely along the cuff.
But Steve is not doing this because he is being some kind of sneaky and perverse guy, jealously looking back in anger at what he’d just had within his grasp but suddenly and irretrievably lost.
There is a specific reason why Steve is here.
You see, earlier today, as Steve was being kicked out with his cardboard box of things into the street by a skinny and pissed-off Ukrainian spokes-chick for the Secret Editorial Board, just as the door was hitting him in the ass on his way out, he heard a number of voices in the hallway exclaiming in short, clipped bursts of breathless excitation on how later that day the Union Joker responsible for fatally insulting the Jews, criminally characterizing their Power as ‘transitory’ in a series of unconventional Anti-Story Notices posted to Kyiv Unedited, would be forced outside at gunpoint by Ukrainian soldiers and given up to the star-chamber-like Podil Noahide Court.
“Following Judgment,” one of the hallway voices says – as Kowalski plays at delay by dropping his box and crouching to pretend-tie a lace-less boot – “whoever that Joker is will likely be marched down the street to their courtyard for summary execution by… guillotine!”
[Emergency Note of Some Alarm from the Kyiv Unedited Secret Editorial Board:
- We hereby extend our complete assurances to Our Readers, Valuable and Invaluable, alike, to the effect that there is no such thing anywhere in the world as a “Noahide Court”, much less one specifically operating in Kyiv’s Podil. We make this claim with our absolute certainty in its veracity, basing it upon uncontradictable and irrefutable fact, having received said fact into our knowledge first-hand from our good Jewish friends in the neighborhood, the greatest experts qualified to provide us with information on the subject, bar none, which standing and reputation can be neither challenged nor denied – for obvious reasons; although anyone out there is welcome to try, but that will only result in your failure, and possibly a number of things worse even than that.
- As for summary judgment by guillotine, we do not know if that claim, or rumor, or better yet, criminal slander and blood libel, is more bizarre than it is absurd. But beyond dismissing it as Utter Nonsense – let’s just put it that way to keep things simple – we will not dignify this antisemitic outrage with further comment. Anyone choosing to revisit this frankly dastardly aspersion and outright lie is hereby forewarned that they do so at their own risk, and don’t expect us to come running to save you.
- Finally, as for us delivering up the one Kyiv Commix Union Joker to our good Jewish friends ‘in da hood’, ha-ha, we hereby admit no more than by so doing we have kept our part of a bargain with our friends, whereby we let go the odious individual to their care, concern, and education, which individual, in a series of unconventional so-called “Anti-Story Notices”, meant by that individual to convey more of a sort of childish protest message, rather than useful critical information, regarding a number of recent stories posted to the Kyiv Unedited website, found the audacity to characterize Jewish Power as being merely ‘fleeting’, using the more highbrow and popularly less accessible adjective “ephemeral” as a way of cowardly hiding under the intended assertion. In exchange, we receive the gift of not having this disgusting and brazenly antisemitic piece of trash any longer in our midst.]
The skinny, angry chick yells at Steve to finally just get out, and he does, picking up his box and shaking his unnerved head in disbelief.
But now – after going home with his box, resting, and eating a bowl of nourishing hot borsch – standing outside the Commix offices, waiting for the prophesized moment, Steve is of a somewhat different mind, although he cannot quite account for how it is that he has returned to the scene of his most recent humiliation, and kind of demise.
That strange feeling notwithstanding, Kowalski is absolutely certain that the Union Joker to be dispensed with is none other than Rodion Tigeryev, the smirking, broad-shouldered scion of a Kyiv business daddy of near-oligarchic proportions, making handsome, young Rodion untouchable to the law (Ukrainian Law, that is), and un-draftable for the war. ‘But!’ Steve shouts inside his head, ‘this despicable Rodion isn’t a Jew, and therein lies the difference, for in that case all untouchability folds like a lawn chair before the Sanhedrin, and falls, rich papa or no!’
Because no sooner did Steve set foot inside the Commix offices, than this Rodion took note of Steve’s acquaintanceship with Ann, alias Commix Girl, for short, CG, sensing, somehow seeing, the almost dead, but still smoldering embers of Steve’s former passion for the girl – a thing this arrogant Rodion did not like. Because there are guys like this, and they deserve to die. And this Tigeryev was all but successfully pressing his advances with Ann, but for some circumstance, some fact, some, perhaps, commitment in Ann’s life, which Steve could not quite comprehend, or perceive, or put his finger on, and which appeared to be holding her back from completely requiting Tigeryev’s advances… for now.
For some background, some months earlier, Ann had quit her job at The Curmudgeon, where Steve still works, to take up a more promising proposition extended her by The Commix.
Soon thereafter, and counterintuitively, Steve pleaded his way into The Commix as a part-time stringer (with on-site desk and computer generously granted him), while still holding on to his “fulltime” post at The Curmudgeon, as a way to stay close to a girl he knew had grown to despise him, and for whom he no longer suffered a yearning, having, to his credit, gotten over it.
But then, why, Steve – why pursue her? Because face it, Steve, some part of you still wants her, and that part is your dick: the real head that still does a lot of your thinking for you. Drop her, Steve; don’t write secret poetry to her, or about her; forget her, take some good and well-meant advice from an observant friend who keeps his distance. You sickening dummy.
Why? Well, Steve, though you may not want to admit it, but believe me, she ain’t worth it.
And now, Steve waits. But not to the end he’d cooked up in his sinfully vengeful and shamefully bloodthirsty head, which presently sees red dots and bubbles in the midst of a deafening roaring.
xxx
“Here to see a beheading, Steve?”
The thunderous, rumbly-grumbly voice suddenly next to Steve frightens him out of his wits, and when he turns to see the Hunched Cornish looking down at and hating him, it frightens him even more, and backward he falls.
Inexplicably, the Cornish appears to take perverse pleasure in extending downward one of his hellishly immense, scarred-over hands to help Steve back up.
“The Hunched Cornish! No! Na… no. No-no-no – I… I’m…”
“Oh, come on, Kowalski. Don’t lie to me. You’re literally out for blood. You could have stayed home and minded your own business. But you were repulsively and very humanly curious; and so, here you are. And you can shut the fuck up about all the rest.”
Silence.
“That’s better. As for me, well, while we’re waiting for the innocent victim to come out to give up his head as a sacrifice to appease ancient forces, I’m here recognizing them as such, without further judgment on my part, only because I’m just about as old, or older, than those forces, and as far as evil goes, a hell of a lot worse. At least by now I can readily and openly admit it – a fact I am glad about regarding myself, but not necessarily grateful, as I don’t acknowledge a ‘to whom’… you savvy?”
“Yeah, sure – but that’s not why you’re here. Don’t lie to me, either, Cornish, since you’ve taken the inexplicable trouble and made it a point to nearly displace me where I was standing, almost killing me with the unexpected godforsaken horror of you.”
“Hmm… hmm… well, okay, Kowalski, in perhaps some small way I do not care to define, you’re partially right. So, I’ll tell you this: There’s a thing I have, well, together with the Half Guinea, whom you’ve been somewhat better acquainted with than me, about heads. It’s a sort of game with us; a contest, or, better still, a competition. I’m here for the head.”
“Of an innocent person? You said so yourself!”
“But that wasn’t your thinking on the matter but a minute ago, Kowalski. Why the sudden change?”
The very next thing Kowalski sees – Wha?! Bob? Covertonesos?! Being shoved through the door from behind by armed Ukrainian soldiers?! Stumbling, almost falling, on the icy sidewalk?! Shocked?! Terrified?! Confused?! BOB?!?!
But, had it not been Bob who’d been the first to welcome and befriend Steve in his new professional environs? And Bob, who drank coffee with Steve at break, being the initiator between them building that friendship, with all the moments in their brief acquaintance they’d spent joking around and shooting the shit? Why would Bob say anything bad about Steve? And why would Bob have it in for Steve, and persistently write into his so-called Anti-Notices harsh and forceful demands for Steve’s firing – for, as it were, Steve’s head?
“Bob? Covertonesos? The Orthodox Christian from America, Bob? In his early forties, fat and balding (of course), Bob? A paragon of the modern alienated and disenfranchised White Cristian American loser, Bob? Wearing his alpine climbing shorts, ankle-high moccasin boots over short, thick, gray itchy-wool socks, and his one prized, coffee-stained Marvel Comics hoody bought years ago Stateside at a Comics Con festival? That Bob?!”
“Yes, that Bob, Steve… that Bob…”
“I can’t believe it… I just can’t believe it…”
“Believe it Steve… believe it…”
CONTINUED – Next One! But just hold on, until we get there first!
Filed by The One Who Shall Remain Unnamed, January 3, 2026