The Beaten Lion

Kazuo scurries between fetid alleyways like the nameless rat he's become since mobs incinerated his grandeur overnight. Luckily, hiding from certain vengeance comes as second nature to one once terrorizing these same alleys during a reckless childhood.

The deposed dictator sleeps in gutters, scrambling for crumbs and desperate payphone calls to old gang lieutenants he hopes will never pick up. The thought of former servants and enemies alike laughing over champagne at his ruin makes Kazuo's blood boil so hotly that his punches leave scorched dumpsters in their wake.

In deluded waking dreams, Kazuo still summons deceptive glory days when all bowed deeply before his passing teenage motorcades, ministers quivered to echo his whims, and pleasure came on demand rather than through needle tips scavenged from the same refuse piles that now clothe his shivering wreckage.

During fitful slumbers, faces of those his sadism sentenced to slow suffering stalk his hazy unconscious. Their silent screams and clawing hands jolt Kazuo from ragged blankets with pounding heart no amounts of pilfered powder or bottles can quiet anymore.

He seethes daily at the injustice, forgetting why crowds cheered his downfall. Blaming all for his reversal besides the one who made degradation a high art. Somewhere locked inside himself writhes that snarling twelve-year-old ready to unleash wrath and reclaim a stolen throne built on the backs of his lessers. While lurking these same streets awaiting that chance, Kazuo perfects afresh the potent poisons of ambition, deceit and contempt for human frailty that first turned him tyrant. And thus the viper coils again in the gutters.