The Curious Tale of Rurik 2

Rurik took his first drag on the thirteenth cigarette of the day as he hauled his considerable bulk off the park bench, letting a crooked smile flash between the unshaven stubble around his lips as he caught an atypically carefree Kimberly swinging from the monkey bars, dangling the sticky shaft of her perpetually rainbow lollipop from her puffy mouth. Much rarer were these moments, the picturesque, homemade videos playing out before him that occasionally  kept his world from turning and tossing long enough for him to dwell on the happier times, the married times, and (when he was feeling particularly nostalgic), the skinny times. Of course, there were still happy times, when a homicidally-driven lover gave him the chance to be her fuzzy, elephantine teddy bear without leaving his mortality hanging in the balance. And sometimes during those moments he found himself, often unwillingly, buying into what Morgan was selling, and saw the faintest, blurriest glimpses of an ordinary, suburban family of bouncing baby Bela Lugosis and Lon Cheneys, special effects factory installed. Skinny times had been out of the picture once the donut shop had reared its beautifully iced-and-sparkled head, but two out of three wasn’t that bad, Rurik mused as he breathed in another fistful of smoke.

As it were, though, reminiscing and daydreaming was never quite enough to pay the next bill or plunk down the Washingtons for the last Bavarian cream pastry, and so Rurik left his memories and fantasies back at the park as he groped through the pockets of his trench coat for the little black notebook his manager had so thoughtfully flung at his face before sending him out on location. “Let’s see here…” he muttered, leafing through the scribbles of Morgan, Kimberly, and a handful of what he assumed was himself a good twelve years and hundred-plus pounds ago until the innocuous doodle of the smiling corpse gazed placidly up at him. “Ah, here we are…”

The sun had started to set by the time Rurik had committed the bulk of the rape to memory and worked his way rather sluggishly to the cramped broom closet that looked vaguely like an office and often carried its unique scented blend of strawberry icing and unfiltered nicotine to the alley that lurked outside his window. Every so often if he paused long enough from his transcriptions to try glimpsing out the paned glass he’d end up eyeballing a marvelously wretched bit of graffiti, and though normally the king’s crown jewels and scepters was the prevalent theme, today he was awarded with a most decidedly unflattering depiction of himself, bloated almost beyond recognition, colorfully living out the last moments of Jesus. “It’s good to know that my new fans can appreciate the finer things in life…” he muttered, dejectedly tossing the cigarette out the window and letting out a satisfied chuckle upon hearing the resulting ‘OW!’

He’d managed to plot out the first bundle of words (‘If you ever worried that you gave your man too much loving, you’ll be more than happy to reconsider why it’s worth tending to your husband’s Mr. Happy once you’ve heard what happened to Mrs. Lafette) when his editor slammed the door wide open, smashing a rather impressive hole into its woodwork in the process. “Rurik! Uh… sorry about your door!” He straightened himself up,  while Rurik, nonplussed, stared ahead. “Your, uh… your…”

“THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE! HIS HOPE ETERNAL! HIS LOVING AND CARING MASTER” A shrill, and painfully familiar, voice shrieked out from the downstairs lobby. Rurik groaned and sank into his chair, ignoring the unsightly creaking and squeaking that soon followed.

“Uh… yeah, what she said…” his editor murmured, himself admittedly rather shaken by the gothic bombshell’s sheer volume as well as her self-proclaimed status as his employee’s ‘master’. Rurik silently lifted himself up from the anguished seat and, with a weary grunt, walked out the door and right past the editor.

“I’ll have the finished story ready tomorrow morning. I doubt hell has donuts, and I’d rather not risk a trip there over a rape story,” he said glancing backwards before clunking down the stairwell and towards his blushing, beastly beau.

“Oh, Ruri, I was so worried!” Morgan said immediately, practically pouncing onto the embittered journalist and sinking into the softness of his chest with a girlish giggle. “You can imagine how panicked I was when you told me some awful man had raped you! If you want, we can have a romantic evening hunting him down and having a friend neuter him!”

“Morgan…” Rurik groaned, slapping his palm to his face at the mortified, audible gasps building up into a crescendo of sympathetic disgust at this inflammatory tidbit of misinformation. “I went to cover a rape case… no one raped me… there are probably three men that desperate, and two of them are Russian watchmakers.”

“Ooooooh…” Morgan let out another childish giggle and shrugged it off with a grin. “Guess I liberated an Uzi for nothing then… pooh… unless –“

“No, and if you try to ask in public I will not hesitate to give Kimberly the password to your MySpace account,” Rurik said, cutting her off before she had a chance to finish. Morgan looked momentarily dejected and wrapped her own lanky arms around the journalist’s chunkier limbs.

“Let’s walk home together, sweetie… you know I don’t take ‘no’ very kindly without compensation…” she whispered, gently pricking the tip of his ear with a delicate nibble of the fang. Rurik winced but smiled unconvincingly, taking her clammy hands in his own as he guided her towards the door. “You’re so sweeeeeeeeeeeet!” she squealed, squeezing his chubby hand till his knuckles turned as white as her.

“So… did you have any plans for tonight…?” Rurik asked, trying very, very vainly to stave off the uncomfortable stares he was getting from his coworkers as he led his mistress out of the stuffy lobby. It wasn’t often that a man who routinely joked with corpses found his nerves frayed and shot, but Morgan had an uncanny talent for knowing exactly which buttons to press and which keys to turn to guile her ‘chubby hubby’ into whatever song and dance her whimsical moods called for; it didn’t hurt that she was relentlessly fond of reminding poor Rurik of just how much he owed her, and just how easily everything could be plucked away from beneath his feet with a flick of the wrist.
“Weeeeeeeell….” Morgan put a finger up to her lip and glanced skywards, where the moon was slowly beginning to creep out from behind the smoggy skyscrapers that dotted the cityscape. A child might’ve guessed her to be deep in thought about how to spend a romantic evening with her lovingly-whipped snuggle-tapir, but from the tone of her voice Rurik knew exactly what she had in mind. “I’m glad you asked, Ruri-poo, ‘cause I’ve got just the thing after getting horribly raped! We’re going clubbing, Vampey-style! It’ll be so much fun!”