Basher

I was walking down 46^th Steet when I saw him. Those deep-set heavy browed half-frightened half-twinkling eyes. That long nose and chipmunk cheeks. That thin, narrow, insolent smirk underneath that joke of a mustache, the kind of mustache a high school burn-out would have scorned. It’s a face that embodies the banality of evil. Bashar al-Assad the tyrant President of Syria.

What was he doing in New York? And alone? The Syrian Embassy must be somewhere around there. No doubt he thought he could slip out on his security, like when he was studying optometry abroad back in the day. All good fun, spoiled princeling antics then. Now it was a deadly mistake. Sorry Bashar, you’re too known a quantity now. Think we Americans are so oblivious to the outside world you can hide in plain sight? Well guess again. Here’s one American who watches Anderson Cooper.

108 people in the Houla. All those bodies shrouded, wrapped and laid out like cigars. I’d seen the corpses in their houses. They’d just wanted to be free, like Egypt and Tunisia and the rest of them, but they’d been born unlucky. They’d been born with this guy, this evil creep who preferred wholesale murder to resignation. He wasn’t even going to be the leader until his brother died. He was going to be an eye-doctor, and now he was a monster. I’d seen the mourners screaming. I’d seen the children, crying, bloody, dead. I’d seen it all, and now I was going to make him pay.

“BASHAR!” He tried to ignore me, but it was clear I was shouting at him, and coming for him. Once he saw there would be no easy brush-off, that he was in trouble, he made some feeble gesture of protest, some whiny noise of confusion. Then I had him.

He tried to pull away, but I swung him around and he fell to the ground. In an instant I was on him, pinning his arms down with my knees, punching down.

“This is for HOULA! This is for HOMS! This is for the KIDS you MURDERED!”

He tried to call out STOP! or something, but I laid in too fast and hard for him to say anything. Soon my fists were slick with blood. He was already too beat up to fight back. It was happening too quickly. There was no satisfaction. So I hooked my thumb into his left eye.

“You should have stuck to optometry, Bashar! Now see if you can fix this!” I dug in. It resisted and wiggled, but soon enough it popped. Then I did the right eye.

Finally I’d had enough of holding on to his slippery, gore streaming head. I gripped it as best I could, and slammed his skull as hard as I could into a fire hydrant, right on the nut. I could feel his head crack and I could feel the metal sinking into his brain. The hydrant must have been somehow faulty, because it began spraying into his head. I washed my hands off in the spray and left him there, watery blood weeping from his eye sockets.

Later it turned out that guy wasn’t Bashar, but he looked like a real asshole anyway.

--Dan Kilian

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