Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

“Her name is Rose Byrne,” said Celia.

“Wonderful!” cried HRH. “A dwarf with a broadsword! Straight from the pages of John Ronald Reuel! Madame, you offer no end of surprises! Where did you find such a creature? I must have her! Another blinkered specimen for my menagerie of the damned! How much must I offer to purchase this beauty?”

“We have no use for money,” said Celia.

“I am not for sale,” said Rose Byrne.

“Sir, I know not how it is that you see the broadsword,” said Celia. “I suggest that you leave us in peace. Rose Byrne is disagreeable and her weapon was sharpened this very morn.”

“You issue threats, madame?” asked HRH.

“A statement of reality,” said Celia.

“Are you as unpleasant as she claims?” HRH asked Rose Byrne. “Your apple face betrays no wrath. I see only dwarven mirth. Sing me a song of the misty mountains cold!”

“I am a whirlwind,” said Rose Byrne.

“If I fluster your companion any further, you will use this sword on my person?” asked HRH. “You will murder my body in Tenants of Trees?”

“Without a doubt,” said Rose Byrne. “Your head will roll on the tiles.”

“Wonderful!” cried HRH. “Wonderful!”

HRH jumped off his bar stool.

HRH kneeled on the ground before Rose Byrne.

HRH bent his head.

“Come now, you broken creature of Khazad-dûm! Here is my neck! Make swift with your cut. Pretend that I am the bastard offspring of Charles the First and the Great God Pan! I will be the martyr of the people! Chop, chop, cut, cut, make your haste!”

Rose Byrne’s previous murders in Tenant of Trees had required a great deal of magic.

Many lives had been erased.

Celia saw no need for the bother.

She cast a spell to transport HRH out of Tenant of Trees.

But the spell fizzled.

Rose Byrne stood over HRH.

Rose Byrne ached with the ideated reality of a serial killer.

She moved her hand to her broadsword.

But she could not remove it from its scabbard.

HRH rose from the ground.

“As I imagined,” HRH said to Rose Byrne. “One more disappointment in the litany that is life.”

HRH sat to Celia’s left.

“Sir,” said Celia. “Who are you that you stayed her hand?”

“I am the alpha and the omega,” said HRH.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Celia.

“I will use a metaphor that I hope gives clarity,” said HRH. “Think of yourself as a being of rare luck. You sit in the presence of a superhero. Throughout the livelong day I am a mild-mannered financial wizard and neoliberal philanthropist. By night, I venture forth and make the world sane. I am like nothing you have ever met. Wait until you read my press coverage. As with the faint hopes of a penile inadequate, it is measured not in length but thickness!”

Celia stood.

“Come, Rose,” said Celia. “Enough of this.”

They walked out of Tenant of Trees.

HRH turned to the woman sitting at his left.

She twenty-five years old.

She was an aspiring actress.

She was from Kissimmee, Florida.

She had moved to Los Angeles to follow her dreams.

Her body was filled with the following psychoactive agents: Paxil, Lexapro, and a microdose of LSD.

“My dear,” said HRH to the aspiring actress, “I wonder if you have ever perused the speeches of Cesar Chavez?”

By the way, all of the women in Fairy Land, and the Fairy Knight too, had Afro-textured hair and skin loaded with eumelanin in the stratum basale of their epidermis.

When the women of Fairy Land wandered around Los Angeles in their vintage metal T-shirts, this is what people thought: Hey, there are some Black girls .

This was followed by another thought: Wait, Black girls like Megadeth? How is that possible?

And this wasn’t because the people of Los Angeles were essentializing, which was a crude mental process by which inherent characteristics were attributed to an arbitrary and socially constructed grouping of humans.

The people of Los Angeles weren’t having this thought because they were racist and believed it unlikely that Black girls would enjoy the sounds of Megadeth.

The people of Los Angeles were having this thought because they were shocked at the bad taste of anyone in a Megadeth T-shirt.

Megadeth were awful.

No one’s accusing you, reader, of having read this book with a mental image of lily-white faeries as its main characters.

But let’s be honest.

All of this book’s other readers have done exactly that.

It’s a cruel narrative trick that relies on ingrained cultural assumptions about mythological beings, character names with Celtic origin, and the underlying biases of fantasy literature.

But it’s not as if there weren’t a few clues back in Chapter Four.

Prince Thomas of the Kingdom of Purpoole clearly refers to Celia’s skin as “dusky.”

Also, Prince Thomas suggests that Celia’s a queen of Clerkenwell and a sister of Luce.

And, as everyone knows, Black Luce or Negro Lucy was a woman of Sub-Saharan African descent who ran a brothel in Clerkenwell during the last decade of the Sixteenth Century AD and the first decade of the Seventeenth Century AD.

It’s not you, reader.

It’s everyone else.

But that’s racial prejudice, isn’t it?

And yes, reader, I understand the peril into which I’ve thrust myself by suggesting that Richard Johnson’s made-up characters possess imaginary physical characteristics which group them into an arbitrary social construct.

Nothing could be more controversial.

Someone might get upset!

On the Internet!

Where important things happen!

No one likes to talk about it, but we live in a world where a significant proportion of the population believes that Batman is real.

Batman is a comic-book character.

Here is his origin story: he was born super rich, and his rich parents were murdered in an alley while Batman watched, and then when Batman’s trust fund matured, he used the money to enact a systemized campaign of violence against the poor.

Batman goes out every night and makes the world sane.

Most of Batman’s true believers don’t believe in the physical reality of Batman.

It isn’t that kind of belief.

It’s religious.

But then again, there are always the ones who think they can talk with gods.

In 2014 AD, there was a news story about a pair of twelve-year-old girls who stabbed another twelve-year-old girl. When the girls were apprehended, they were asked why they had tried to murder their BFF. The girls told the cops that they were killing for Slender Man.

Slender Man was an imaginary supranatural character that had been created by someone on the Internet.

Slender Man wore a bad suit and he hung out with children and he inspired tedious academic papers by bottomfeeders.

When the girls were asked why Slender Man wanted them to kill, they said that Slender Man would reward their human sacrifice with a resplendent palace in Hell, where they would rule for eternity amongst the damned.

The bottomfeeders who wrote academic papers about Slender Man weren’t that different from the girls who stabbed their BFF.

They were looking for tenure at state-funded universities, which meant that they too were seeking a resplendent palace in Hell, where they too would rule for eternity amongst the damned.

The media played the stabbing for its obvious shock.

Given the character’s origins, which were heavily documented and easily verifiable, how could anyone think that Slender Man was real?

Psychological examinations revealed that one of the assailants was in regular telepathic communication with Mr. Spock from Star Trek , all four of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter books.