Russell Twyce

Part one of this vignette, ‘My name is Ivanka’ is here – How to make the world better

Love at first sight is a trite phrase that doesn’t even begin to manifest the exquisite passion occurring in a fluttering of an eyelid. ‘She was an exotic vision of femininity surpassing my notebook drawing, as the Mona Lisa outshines a kindergarten stick drawing in finger-paint.’ ‘Her eyes were liquid brown,’ Russell recalled dreamily, ‘as a lacquered walnut bar lit by flashing nightclub strobes. Shimmering ribbons of dark brunette hair, raced in tantalizing slow motion, like a torrent of chocolate running over rocks and my fingers yearned to be canoes, shooting the rapids of her tresses and bending the law of attraction.’

She looked at him but didn’t speak. She didn’t need to because her expression asked the question – ‘what do you want?’ Since she was also a proprietor of a coffee kiosk, her setting behind the counter similarly supplied the query.

‘I want you.’ Russell’s mind answered. ‘I want to see what you look like in the pale moonlight and I wish to know how to make the world better. I’d like to my tongue savoring the minty taste of your toothpaste as it explores the surfaces of your teeth.’ “Coffee.” He managed to voice.

She quickly prepared his order but before they could speak more, another customer arrived. And then another wanted coffee and a cookie. Whole busloads of tourists had been watching and photographing the intricate marching drill of the change of the guard, but now they wanted coffee to chase away the chill of the drizzle.

Russell stood apace from the counter, sipping his beverage and occasionally risking a glance at her. His eyes had worked like surveyors, mapping out the body contours hiding in her stylishly casual attire. Occasionally, her brown eyes flicked onto his, as she bustled efficiently about her work duties. And more patrons kept arriving.

‘My dreams tonight,’ he told her in his mind, ‘and perhaps for all of this month, will be of you. But my darling, our sweet fiction fated not to become truth.’ He had ruefully counted buses parked on the street and suspected she would be busy for some time. So long that he would seem as a stalker if he continued to wait. Russell silently toasted the girl’s elegant beauty, before finishing the dregs of his java and tossing the paper cup into the trash.

He trudged back to his tour bus and boarded with the excitement of going to a beloved relative’s funeral.

“The next stop on our search for stories might sound fishy,” the guide chuckled slightly, to give a useless hint for people to be ready to laugh, “but we have a date with the mermaid, in truth instead of in fiction.”

‘Thanks for rubbing it in’. He felt the unfunny joke was mocking him. Then as the bus began to roll away from the curb, he peered out the window a last time.

“Wait!” He yelled out loud. The girl was piling chairs onto the tables and closing up shop. But it was too late, the tour was continuing and he was stuck on it.

‘Why didn’t I linger just a few minutes more?’ He could now see that many of the other buses were seemingly just sitting unoccupied in the large parking lot. ‘My romantic search for a story has ended with my library card marked null and void.’

He hadn’t been enjoying the Copenhagen tour, but now he loathed it. He moved to the very back seat to be as far from the tedious guide as possible and for the bumps in the road to rattle the disappointment from his mind—it didn’t work.

Then the bus came to the final tourist attraction. Sitting on her cairn of rocks in the harbor, the little mermaid looked as forlorn as Russell felt. She was truth or fiction was he.

“Please shoot a poisoned dart into the tour guide’s neck.” He asked the statue. ‘That would be how to make the world better’. Her bronze skin was mottled green with tarnish: it looked like a jungle’s verdant glow on an Amazonian native. A passing seagull had supplied a wide streak of chalk white on her face, resembling a blowgun-wielding warrior’s tribal war paint.

The drizzle had turned to a sprinkle and then as the bus reached its end terminus, to a steady rain. Russell dejectedly stepped down and his shoe splashed into a puddle.

‘One soaked sock is an appropriate end to my day.’ He mentally remarked, and then he looked ahead. ‘But here’s a tour finish with sublime panache.’ The girl was there. I had manifested her there. She was standing in the alcove of a brick-walled building. The locked door behind prevented her from backing up far enough to gain a full sheltering under the stone lintel. Several droplets landed on the tip of her nose, making it twitch as a rabbit’s.

“My name is Ivanka.” She said as he approached.

“That doesn’t sound Scandinavian.”

“I’m Czech.” Ivanka replied. “Ah.” He made the sound seem as knowing as possible, as if he fathomed perfectly how her being Czech in Denmark held significance. ‘That means just about nothing to my search for stories, but ‘ah’ augers better for my prospects than ‘huh’ would.’

Law is a lion

A social order fiction for your search for stories

A psychopath had positioned himself at booth selling briefcases. He had bought a few dozen cases and then had a couple of posters made up, that suggested he was as a legal needs marketer. Using a fictional company name and the logo ‘Law is a lion’, the killer had rented a space at a lawyer’s seminar. Along with cases and brochures, he had smuggled in some weaponry.

When the show was at it’s busiest time, on Saturday afternoon, the psychopath put a placard on his ‘Law is a lion’ table reading ‘out conducting business’. Then he took out his guns and mingled with the conference attendees. And fifty-three people died in one of the worst mass murders in history. After expending all his ammunition, he set his small arsenal aside and sat patiently waiting for the police to arrive to reestablish the social order.

“Law is a lion.” He said to the first policeman. “These lawyers heard the lion roar.”

The swat team responded with a Miranda warning, while roughly cuffing him.

“Law is a lion.” The prosecutor repeated. He had responded immediately to be in full participation during the interrogation. “What did you mean by that?”

“I suspect you’ll be intelligent enough to figure it out.” The psychopath responded. The killer then proved cooperative by answering all the detail questions of where he procured the guns and how he set up for the killings.

“Why did you kill lawyers?” The state’s attorney asked.

“I didn’t kill anyone.” The murder said with an impassive face. “I evoked the lion’s roar and the law murdered it’s own. I deemed it appropriate to use lawyers. The law is a lion and lawyers are lawyers. The law lion bit down hard on its own tail.”

“Hundreds of witnesses saw you in your act of murder and nobody but you reported the presence of any escaped zoo animals.” The prosecutor scoffed. “I recommend strongly, that you call a lawyer, but you’ll end up as a caged animal anyways.”

“Of course you would feel that way.” The psychopath mocked back. “Because you’re a lawyer. I neither need nor want a lawyer representing me with untruth.”

“You allegedly committed the heinous murders and either with or without a lawyer, you’ll be spending the rest of your life in jail.”

“I didn’t kill anyone,” the psychopathic killer repeated, “and you’re more than welcome to put me to a polygraph test.”

“The results would be suspect. Psychopaths are purportedly able to beat them.” “Why do you suppose that is?” “Psychopaths are generally of above average intelligence.”

“And do we out-think the machines?” The killer laughed at the absurd statement. “I’ve read extensively on psychopathic traits and frankly, you know next to nothing about us. Truthfully, I suspect you do know more but you’re repressing it because our ‘above average’ intellects have told us something that you don’t want those of lesser intelligence becoming aware of.” The psychopath leaned as far forward as his restraints would allow and he whispered. “The law is a lie and it’s why psychopaths commit crimes. But the psychopath never actually hurts the victim: he breaks the law and the law then forwards the harm on. That’s how the lion law works.”

“In your mind,” the prosecutor guessed, “the law is lying and that sounds similar to ‘lion’. I’m supposing that your saying ‘lawyers are lawyers’ was meant as ‘lawyers are liars’ because those two words also have a similar sound.”

“I knew you’d be smart enough to figure it out.” “A court seeks for truth.” “Horse manure!” The psychopath snorted. “Your law court will be determining if I broke the state’s law against murder, multiple times. And breaking the state’s law in protest is precisely what my full intent was. If I could’ve spectacularly broken the law without people dying, I would’ve preferred that, but the murder law requires a human sacrifice. The law should stand in the docket with me: if law wasn’t deemed to exist, then I wouldn’t have broken it, and those who died would still be alive.

“Anarchy is the alternative to law!”

“That is lion law’s biggest lie!” The psychopath resolutely said. “A social order keeping philosophy that isn’t rooted on lies, is law’s true alternative. Psychopaths are the vanguard of an army of truth that will tack the law’s lying lion skin to a shed.”