The mother expresses reservations, and is banished, while the doctor signs the papers to let his son go
It is a fair and crisp late summer early morning, though not that early, at Good-Ol’ Olson’s Coffee Shoppe ‘n’ Deli, located on Main Street in the Village of Angry Sparrow, etched into an outer crescent of the bleak wilds of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
Through the storefront window, the sun’s cheerful rays, absent the burden and discomfort of midsummer’s heat, usher in a growing warmth that is pleasing and somehow reassuring to this morning’s several patrons, who, for the last 20 minutes or so, have been nursing the porcelain cups of their lukewarm coffees between nervous hands.
They are, seated there at one table, two sides of a negotiation over the fate of the Boychild Ferret. This is the prize young-developing and humanlike creature who, depending on the outcome of this meeting, will either return back home to Southern New Jersey, in or around Camden, or just across the Delaware, somewhere in the greater Philadelphia Metropolitan Area (for none of the later Ferret lore has ever made itself clear, or come clean, on this point) with the Romchuk family to face yet another year of their son attending a boring private Catholic school the doctor and his wife can barely afford, wanting only the best for their Ferret Boy, who, as in previous years, will cause a lot of trouble there…
… or be abruptly whisked away into the bowels of some secret new U.S. Government science education program for gifted children, apparently under the direction of this amiable but strangely disturbing, young-looking old man, who goes by the name of Josh Davies.
Mother Romchuk looks at the man pensively, with undisguised worry and concern. She notes the short man’s getup, which, minus the highly-developed raccoon (courtesy of the U.S. Government, your tax dollars at work), is unchanged from yesterday: a red-and-black, plaid-patterned farmhouse shirt, new-blue and still-stiff farmer jeans, the cuffs of which are stuffed into a pair of shiny and clean high-ankle, high-heel brown logger boots. For some reason, the man appears to like his jeans belt-cinched tightly around the bottom of an obtrusively ballooning belly – except for one thing, the mother thinks, before proceeding to notice other apparent and disquieting changes from just the day before: the man’s belly is no longer so big, and the belt, while still pulled tight, no longer appears particularly cinched.
The Ferret Boy, a keen observer of phenomena and the changes of things around him, has already taken note of all the man’s transformations – some subtle, and others, not – that the mother is only beginning to gather. The only one at the table faster at it than the Boychild is the Ferret’s father, Doctor Romchuk, thanks to his medical training and years of experience in his generously Hippocratic and quickly disappearing field of general practitioner and house-call quack – a type of thing we don’t get anymore.
In preparation for the meeting with Josh Davies, the Boychild Ferret had packed his pant pockets, as well as a little dark-green hiking knapsack he’d never gotten to use at the faggy-sissy summer camp his parents had sent him to, with a large collector’s sample of Hot Wheels (and Matchbox) cars, fully intending to zoom them up and down the café table, in-between the porcelain coffee cups and plates of Danishes and buttery toasted English muffins, accompanied by spittle-filled sound effects and imitation Indie-500-type commentary, to annoy the hell out of this turkey-necked Davies, while pleading his status as just a kid before his embarrassed parents.
‘Heh, they can’t do anything to me. I’m just a little kid – heh…’
But the Boychild forgot all about his disruptive plans, being immediately stricken, and therefore thrown off his game, by this Davies’ chameleon-like changes in appearance, for his neck was no longer so wrinkly, almost not at all, and he had more hair, which was darker, with very little gray, and his belly was not so big, and his jeans, therefore, not so tightly cinched.
“Heh, how did you do that?”
“Oh, I’ve got my ways…”
“Maybe you’d like some chocolate milk,” the mother suddenly cries to her middle offspring, for no other reason, apparently, than to break the incomprehensible tension.
“Heh, I can buy whatever I want myself. I’ve got seventy-eight dollars from my big win in court yesterday. But I don’t want to be a lawyer. That’s for losers. I’m gonna be a doctor – better than him! (points at his father) – and a professional hockey player, too! Heh…”
“Well, we can work on the doctor part, at least, and even more scientific things than that, Young Romchuk; that is, if you show –”
“You say like we already have agree,” Mother Romchuk says, interrupting Josh Davies, “but we even do not know yet what –”
“You know,” says Davies to the doctor, in his turn interrupting the nervous woman, “there are some men in this world who make it, as men, but they are a minority. All the rest, I’m afraid…”
The doctor confers with the woman, quietly, diplomatically, but firmly. She gets up, gives the table and everyone at it a non-committal and blurry once-over, and leaves, mindful that the door not hit her ass on the way out.
The doctor looks sad, even heartbroken, about what he’s just done.
“Heh, I could’ve told my mother to leave. I speak Ukrainian! She’d do whatever I say – heh… heh…”
xxx
We now see the doctor signing some papers – official government documents, no doubt; an agreement – and sliding them back over to Josh Davies.
“Heh… When I’m twenty-five, I’m going to run away from home with the money he (points at his father) gives me for med school and go to a newly independent Ukraine to become a journalist, fighting filthy-rich oligarchs, which I don’t even know what that means yet, digging deep into their shady lives and deals to uncover their corruption and save democracy, and no one’s going to stop me – heh…heh…”
“So, in two days, Doctor Romchuk, as we agreed, which would be this Saturday, at 8 a.m., out in front of Sven Person’s Diner…”
“I know place, Hangman’s Corner, never eat there, just before turnoff to county road…”
“That’s right. Except it’s Hanged Man’s Corner, not Hangman’s. Two separate words: Hanged… Man’s.”
“Oh, I did not know, my apologies, but I am not here, only with wife few short weeks in summer, kind of working vacation, ha-ha, so do not know so well the names of all the famous places, but I –”
“Heh… and then I’m going to work my way up to becoming completely independent and the world’s first-ever journalism consultant, heh…”
“It seems a lot of people get that wrong, though, for the life of me, I can’t understand why. Oh, it’s no big thing, really; just something for you to tuck away in your memory… for possible future reference… to demonstrate to your friends, perhaps, over a shared glass of mulled wine, in the subdued lighting of a crackling fire in wintertime… well, your trivial knowledge of local points of interest… but… I apologize, sir, as I couldn’t have, nor should I have, expected you to get something so otherwise insignificant and inconsequential right. After all, Hangman’s Corner is so preposterously close to Hanged Man’s Corner that, well…”
“… and then get a job writing for a famous London-based broadsheet, which I don’t even know what that means, but still keep my job at the second-rate English-language rag reporting on Ukraine in Kyiv and pulling down a fulltime salary while only working there parttime by boasting my real fulltime credentials at the London paper…”
“But I’m surprised, doctor. You and your lovely wife should try Sven’s sometime. Best homemade apple pie I’ve ever tasted, these parts at least, though nothing can really compare to – well, Georgia man, myself, doctor, born and bred, you understand…”
“… but back in Kyiv I’m going to end up really running the whole pathetic tabloid newsroom operation filled with a bunch of gullible, naïve, and easy-to-control losers, but from a subordinate position, like, just under the chief editor, who I’m going to control, and then use him to manipulate everybody else, build them up and then set them up for falls if I think they deserve it and have to go, and if the chief editor doesn’t like it, I’ll have him replaced with someone who’ll bend to my will… Heh…”
“Oh, and Person’s fry up a great T-bone steak, too. It must be those New Jersey cows. Many other good things to be had at ol’ Sven’s, I’ll warrant. Upon my word, you wouldn’t regret it. You should really give it a try on Saturday, when you give up your, ah… your boy…”
“Heh… heh… heh…”
Filed by Saint Stephan, September 3, 2025