Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

“I have told you,” said Celia. “I am the Queen of Fairy Land.”

“A queen of Clerkenwell, more like, a sister of Luce,” said Prince Thomas. “What a jest! Dressed as a queen! Did they send you here to inquire of me, my girl, as you inquired of the Red-Rose Knight? Are you this prince’s tribute? Is it my bed that next you target?”

“Where do you sleep?” asked Celia.

“I keep a chamber in the south court. Beyond this door and a small walk.”

“Is it fit for a queen to consort with a prince?”

“Our two kingdoms, my queen, are not as of other kingdoms,” said Prince Thomas. “So why should our congress be ruled by their practices? My lady, you arise in me the sacred demon of ungovernableness!”

Celia followed Prince Thomas to his chamber in the south court.

It was tepid British sex with the chinless scion of an upper-class family.

But it’d been almost a thousand years since Celia had fucked.

She took what she could get.

When Celia emerged from Prince Thomas’s chambers, she found Rose Byrne standing outside of the building.

“My lady,” said Rose Byrne. “Have you finished with your antics?”

“I believe so,” said Celia.

“Let us anon. Fairy Land is waiting.”

“A word,” said Celia.

“Yes, my lady?” asked Rose Byrne.

“You saw the false Rusticano.”

“Who could miss the spectacle?”

“When we return to Fairy Land,” said Celia, “you are free to speak of the play in any fashion that you might wish. My one request is that you not inform anyone of the false Rusticano.”

“I do as you command,” said Rose Byrne.

“I would not have him know of the insult,” said Celia. “For the peace of us all.”

As they walked towards the Holborn gate, Rose handed Celia a small book.

“Part II,” said Rose, “of Tom a Lincoln .”

“How did you come by this?” asked Celia.

“I had some time while you were at your frolic,” said Rose. “I convinced the little man that he wanted my cured ham.”

“Was there any violence?”

“Only a bit,” said Rose.

Then about four hundred years happened.

The industrial revolution poisoned the Earth’s atmosphere, the United States of America was founded on the dual principles of genocide and human slavery, and soccer became very popular.

And Fern lost herself in Los Angeles.

Which meant that Celia had, once more, to leave Fairy Land. She took Rose Byrne with her.

Those four hundred years, by the way, were some of the most monumental in the planetary existence of homo sapiens.

Fern had warned Celia about the changes, back before her disappearance, and Celia had caught some glimpses on Fairy Land’s woolen television.

If you asked people living in Los Angeles during the Year of the Froward Worm about the last four hundred years, they’d almost certainly talk about things like the Internet, smartphones, and air travel.

But the women of Fairy Land were immortal and undying beings, and they viewed the previous four hundred years in a very different light than the people living in Los Angeles.

The women of Fairy Land knew that most of the technological developments of the previous four hundred years were about as impressive as an old dog learning a new trick, only to discover that the dog’s new trick was something useless like shelling pumpkin seeds, translating the Apocalypse of the Pseudo-Methodius out of Syriac, or building a career in the American recording industry by performing parodies of popular songs.

Smartphones, the Internet, and air travel were only refinements of a principle that had governed human behavior from its very beginnings.

All the technology really did was create new ways for a person to be annoyed by the neighbors.

Fern and Celia knew where the real change had been.

They knew what the real difference was between Los Angeles in the Year of the Froward Worm and, say, the early medieval period or the Ancient Hellenic era.

Fern and Celia knew that the real change had come with the development of indoor plumbing and, specifically, the management of sewage.

Celia and Fern were more sensitive than usual to the problem of human waste and its effective management.

After all, they’d both watched the Red-Rose Knight be assassinated by Orson’s shit.

The effective management of human sewage had been developed about one hundred years prior to the Year of the Froward Worm.

Homo sapiens had been on Earth for about two hundred thousand years, which means that it took the planet’s dominant species roughly one hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred years before someone realized that people shouldn’t do a poo on the living-room floor.

So don’t get your hopes up.

When Celia and Rose Byrne went to Los Angeles, they had difficulty in figuring out where they should arrive.

It wasn’t like London in the Seventeenth Century AD.

Fern hadn’t left any magical beacons hanging around to guide her mother through the landscape.

Los Angeles County was four thousand square miles.

When Celia cast her spell that opened a magic window onto Los Angeles, she had to do a little faery fudging, asking that the window open on the place which would be the most hospitable to their arrival.

She didn’t specify the exact nature of this hospitality.

The magical window opened in the lobby of the Vista Theater, which was a movie house in the neighborhood of Los Feliz.

The Vista, which was a giant single-screen theater, had been built in 1923 AD.

The exterior façade of the building was Spanish Colonial Revival, but its interior décor was early Twentieth-Century AD Egyptian kitsch, which meant that the theater was filled with Pharaonic heads and hieroglyphics.

Celia and Rose Byrne arrived on the evening of Thursday, June 2nd, 2017 AD.

This evening hosted the Vista’s first screening of Wonder Woman , the huge media spectacle in which a lesbian named Diana left her magical island with the intention of beating the shit out of some Germans.

For decades, the Vista had been managed by a man named Victor Martinez.

A curious feature of Victor’s tenure was his delight in dressing up as characters from the films that showed at the Vista.

Victor’s appearances in these outfits were always more enjoyable than the films themselves.

When the Vista had shown Iron Man , which was about a war profiteer who learned that war profiteering could be more profitable if the war profiteer built a suit of armor and personally killed Muslims with his own mechanical hands, Victor Martinez wore a version of the war profiteer’s suit of armor.

When the Vista had shown The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey , which was about a fussy midget drawn into an unlikely adventure by a slightly pompous wizard, Victor Martinez dressed as the wizard.

When the Vista had shown Pirates of the Caribbean 3 , which was a film about a pirate rapist with a charming accent, Victor Martinez dressed as the pirate rapist.

Because Wonder Woman was about a female character, Victor Martinez did not dress as the film’s lead role on June 2nd, 2017 AD.

Instead, he dressed as the film’s male sidekick, an indistinct American soldier during World War One.

Another of the Vista’s employees, who was a woman, dressed as the lead character of Wonder Woman .

They stood outside the theater, greeting attendees.

Victor Martinez and his fellow employee were not the only people dressed in costumes on June 2nd, 2017 AD.

A curious feature of early Twenty-First-Century AD life was that fans of media spectacles liked to dress up as characters which appeared within those media spectacles.