Screw the Zoo

The leonine samurai Dijas Kai watched and waited high in a tree for the perfect time to strike. Even with his massive frame, the dense foliage provided a perfect camouflage for his green robe. His breathing was shallow and measured so as not to attract the attention of zoo patrons. He didn’t want to throw his blade around so recklessly, but these rifle-wielding zookeepers stationed at every cage might give him a reason to. The thought of having his own prison to live in brought a vicious glare to his face.

“Nobody deserves to be caged like this,” Dijas thought to himself as he scoped the zoo at the various “attractions”. Monkeys flipping around for the giggles of small children. Elephants lazing around on the concrete while being bombarded with peanuts. Giraffes trying to find space to stick their heads out of their undersized cages. The one attraction that made Dijas’s muscles tense was seeing baby lions moping in their enclosure with no mother to play with.

Seeing these imprisoned animals sent a hot rage through the samurai’s veins. He wanted to stain the ground with these insufferable humans’ blood. He wanted to snap necks, slash limbs, and smash faces, all with extreme prejudice and no absence of malice. It wasn’t his time to strike just yet.

Too many zookeepers with their tranquilizer darts ready to fire. Too many fat obnoxious patrons munching on cotton candy and drinking caffeinated sugar water while ignoring the cries of their bratty children. In Dijas’s mind, these people deserved each other. Then again, it was better to pull this operation off during the day than at night when the security intensified with robotic traps and even more powerful guns.

In addition to the lonely lion cubs that customers were blindly “awing” over, another enclosure grabbed Dijas’s attention: one that was covered with a surrounding curtain. Even with his distance high in the tree, he could make out the sign that said, “Sarah Tonin”. A cheap joke, no doubt, as if these animals needed more humiliation at the hands of careless owners.

When the zookeepers removed the curtain, however, Dijas’s blood boiled like molten lava. It wasn’t a family of monkeys. It wasn’t more miserable lions. It was a shackled human being. She sat on a tree stump with her head hung low and tears dropping from her eyes. Her face was painted like a skeleton clown and her only clothing was a black athletic bra and gray sweatpants. Her hair was done in the style of red pigtails, as if to add to the cuteness factor in the same way baby lions did by rolling around.

“Hey, monster! You want a peanut?!” shouted a little boy before chucking a handful at Sarah. She barely flinched when the salty snacks hit her. Her flinching intensified when cotton candy was being thrown at her. Her flinching turned to thrashing when she felt the coldness of an energy drink splashed against her smooth skin.

The patrons’ fits of laughter and mockery were hushed as they looked around for the source of a lion’s growl. Surely, the baby cubs couldn’t have made such a frantic noise. They were just children. Another growl sounded off across the zoo. And a much louder growl made the customers shiver in their giant shorts. Once noisy children were now whimpering against their mother’s thunder thighs. Ignorant fathers also huddled with their wives as the lion’s roar descended upon their fragile ears. Zookeepers’ rifles were locked and loaded as they looked around for the source.

The group of gunners huddled close together and formed a circle around their disgusting patrons. One shot from their rifles and their target would snooze and drool for hours on end. Dijas didn’t care; this was his time to strike! With his katana drawn and his roars deafening the crowd, he leaped down from the tree and sliced one of the zookeepers in two from asshole to appetite. Customers bundled together and shrieked in terror at the sight of organs and blood splashing all over the pavement.

The zookeepers aimed their rifles at Dijas and were ready to take him down if it wasn’t for the massive anthropomorphic lion grabbing a heavyset couple and using them as human shields with his blade firmly against their necks. “Go ahead! Fire! Shoot those tinker toys like you actually stand a fucking chance! You think I give a shit about these so called innocent lives?! Nobody here is innocent! You all are a bunch of disgusting shit weasels with too much self-esteem and not enough discipline! You’re teaching your children to be just as hateful as you! You people make me sick!”

“Take it easy, big guy. Nobody needs to get hurt,” said one of the eight remaining zookeepers as his arms shook the entire time.

“What do you mean nobody needs to get hurt?!” shouted Dijas. “I’m hurting now! These animals are hurting! And most of all, that poor girl you so cleverly named Sarah Tonin is hurting the worst! She’s a human fucking being, for god’s sake! And you decided to give her a cute little punch line for a name?!”

“It was my idea,” said Sarah in a medicated tone. Everybody’s attention turned away from the sword-slinging lunatic and towards the teary-faced “clown” with her neck and back painfully hunched over. “I deserve to be here. I’m not a human being. I’m an animal, just like the lions and monkeys. I don’t deserve to be loved. I’m just a freak of nature. Don’t take pity on me.”

Dijas’s heart sank like a brick tied around a drowning man’s ankle. Tears formed in his once fierce eyes, a frown sagged his rough features, and his blade’s grip around the obnoxious family’s throats loosened to where they could slide underneath and be free.

“Hey, assholes! Pay attention! Shoot him!” shouted one of the zookeepers. A popping noise sounded off and Dijas dropped to his knees, shedding the last of his waterfall tears before slumping over to the ground and weeping like the bored animal he was about to become. His whimpering became progressively softer until his animalistic drool mixed in with the pool of blood he left earlier.

“Holy shit, that was close!” said one of the zookeepers. Patrons silently backed away with tears in their own eyes as the riflemen gathered around Dijas’s prone body to try and lift the heavy beast. They kept debating among themselves who took the shot that knocked the samurai out. Nobody would admit to it. The debate turned into a cacophonic shouting match as the zookeepers held the lion by his arms and legs.

Their ear-piercing jibber-jabber was silenced by the sound of Dijas letting out a monstrous laugh. The zookeepers let go of him as the lion produced the shell of a tiny cherry bomb from his pocket in the palm of his paw. He rolled on his back, smiled evilly at them, and said, “All of these advances in science and technology and none of you idiots can figure out if you’ve fired your rifles or not. Great job, nimrods!”

The wily samurai drew his blade once again and flew around in a circle, slashing the throats of all eight zookeepers surrounding him. Patrons screamed and dispersed as blood shot up in the skies like Old Faithful. Some of the zookeepers even fell on their own rifles and shot themselves as their corpses went limp.

All that mattered to the blood-soaked Dijas was sitting in a cage with clown makeup on and tears smearing her paint job. The lion wiped a tear from his own eye with his paw and sauntered over to the cage before ripping the bars wide open and letting himself in. He placed a gentle paw on the slack shoulder of Sarah Tonin, who looked up at him with puppy-dog eyes and said, “Go away. I don’t deserve love.”

“Why not?” said Dijas in a sweet voice. “Is it because that’s what people have told you your whole life? Is it because you see no other way to live than by sulking in this cage? This zoo is not your home. Even the coldhearted streets would be better living conditions than this shit hole. This zoo has been home to countless health violations that the government chooses to do nothing about, because they’re too busy imprisoning minorities and apparently animals too. I know this because I too had my self-esteem ripped away by this cruel system. I didn’t belong anywhere simply because of who I am. Society wanted to lock me up for good. I had to fight for my freedom, just like you have to fight for yours. If you’re looking for love, look no further than me.”

Dijas gave Sarah a sweethearted smile and hugged her with all of his animal warmth. He even rubbed his mane against her face like a domestic kitty would. He also purred like a lawnmower in her ear, allowing a small grin to form on her face. Even with shackles on, Sarah managed to hug Dijas around the neck and cry softly into his fur. “Please get these chains off of me!” she begged, to which the lion smiled at her and with one powerful rip tore the shackles like paper.

Their moment of love was interrupted by the sounds of boots pounding the pavement and rifles clicking off in the distance. Sarah grabbed a wooden staff in the corner of her cage, smiled even wider at Dijas, and said, “Thank you so much for the love you’ve given me. I won’t forget you. But if we’re going down, we’ll meet our fates together.”

The two warriors hugged each other one last time before the one of the reinforcements shouted, “There they are! Shoot them!” The lion and the “freak” nodded together and drew their weapons with the intent of going down with a blaze of glory. In no uncertain terms, Sarah Tonin shouted, “Die, motherfuckers, die!” before shattering the bones of zookeepers left and right with her staff. Dijas roared like the mega beast he was as he slashed at anyone who moved (except for Sarah) with both his lion claws and his katana.

The two renegades didn’t know when death would take them or how violently it would happen. But as long as they were going to hell together, Dijas and Sarah would drag a few souls down with them. Blood, bones, and organs splattered across the floor of the wildlife park as more zookeepers rushed in on the scene to meet their splatterpunk deaths. For the first time in a long time, Dijas and Sarah were happier than pigs in shit. Hell, they were already rolling around in shit anyways in the form of zookeepers, so they might as well enjoy the ride.

The Ophidiomancer

When Shaun Goldberg breathed fresh cool air for the first time in his life, he was nearly brought to tears. The grass underneath his bare feet felt softer than a kitten’s fur coat. The wind massaged his wounded body with every heavenly blast. For a minute, he thought he actually was in heaven. Then again, even a public bathroom would have been heaven compared to the blood-and-shit-covered cage he was locked in from childhood to his current thirty years. Bending those bars in half and running away gave him a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

With only a sheep mask and a pair of blue jeans to cover himself with, Shaun ventured out into the countryside plains looking for…god knew what. He had no idea what the hell was supposed to be out here. Would the strangers of this new land treat him just as badly as his mother had? Pushing that possibility out of his mind was like fighting with a schizophrenic ghost. The visions of his mother beating him with a belt and setting him on fire caused him to clutch his head so tightly that his ears bled. He had scars and slashes all over his chest and back because of it.

When the traumatic nightmares fought harder and harder to make Shaun’s head explode, he ran across the wheat field with no destination and a freakish cry in his lungs. He could only run for a short distance since his exhausted legs gave out on him. He crashed to his knees and bawled like a baby. He screamed like a wild beast and flailed his arms like morning stars. What good was having freedom if he had nowhere to go, no education, and nobody to talk to? Was he only delaying the inevitable? Was his thirty years on earth just one miserable hellhole?

Shaun’s traumatic voices were interrupted by religious chanting off in the distance. That baritone voice. Those Latin words. The hisses of poisonous snakes. Could he really be out here? Shaun picked his head up and stared languidly at the ritual going on before his very eyes. Yes, it was him! Reverend Carlos Pierre, the televangelist his mother used to watch on TV all the time. With such charisma in the preacher’s voice and a strong presence, surely Mr. Pierre could help Shaun find his way again.

When the masked giant approached the snakebite ceremony, he looked down on the ground to see several of Carlos’s followers rolling around and coughing up venom. The preacher smiled down at them and spoke in tongues while sprinkling some kind of dust on their bodies. With a blue Hawaiian shirt, white trousers, and sandals with black socks, Carlos looked more like a casual slob than a legitimate cleric. But what would Shaun know about fashion? For all he knew, Reverend Pierre was the real deal.

The priest gazed up at Shaun with his thousand mile stare and said, “You’ve come to the right place, my son. We were just in the middle of a ritual. You’re welcome to join us. Heck, it was probably destiny to begin with. The gods have brought you here, my friend. I know that you’re lost and you don’t know what to do. Kneel before me and all will become clear.”

Shaun was shivering with nervousness at the possibility of finding out what his true purpose in life was. He couldn’t have been a punching bag all these years. There was more to it all than that and he was sure Carlos was going to show him the way. With shivering legs, he got down on one knee like they did in the telecasts and bowed his head.

“Very good, my son. You should know by know what’s coming next,” said Carlos with his devious grin. From the crumbling stone well next to him, he pulled out a brick compartment and opened the hatch to release a hooded cobra from its resting place. He picked up the little bastard and petted it like a newborn puppy. “Hello there, little guy. Who’s my handsome little man? You are, my friend!” The Reverend kissed the cobra on the head before holding it like a whip and approaching Shaun while speaking in strange tongues.

The seven-foot tall giant lifted his head for a slight moment and leaped backwards while screaming like an infant. He remembered seeing these kinds of snakes all the time around his cage. He would cry out in the middle of the night and his mother wouldn’t help him. He got bitten and traumatized by these little hellions and his intense whiny breathing said it all: it was going to happen in adulthood.

Carlos wagged his finger at Shaun and smiled before saying in his smooth jazz voice, “Now, now, my son. You want to be healed, right? You want all of those scars on your body to fade away? You want to meet your savior and creator? You must go through with this, my friend. There is no other way to salvation. If you can’t trust this million dollar smile, what can you trust? Do me one other favor, my boy: take off that silly mask.”

“I…I…I can’t, Mister Reverend Sir. She won’t let me! That bitch won’t let me!” panicked Shaun with his hands defensively over his face.

“I’ll let that burst of foul language slide this time around, but if you do it again, you’ll find yourself in a fiery pit by the time this ritual is over. You don’t want to go there, do you? You look like that’s where you’ve been this whole time. Whoever this woman is you’re referring to, she can’t hurt you now. Nobody can hurt you now. The snakebite is all but a heavenly sting. And then the juices will release you from your worst nightmares. Now do as I say and take that mask off,” said Reverend Pierre in a firm, but polite voice.

Shaun slowly let his hands down and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Pierre. I can’t do it. You don’t want me to. I’m just going to be a sinner if I do.”

Like the animal he held in his hands, Carlos struck quickly when he yanked Shaun’s mask off. The preacher’s expression changed from polite psychosis to pants wetting fear. “Holy shit!” he whispered when he backpedaled and held his cobra out like a sword. The reptile hissed and flicked its tongue in Shaun’s direction.

Both the sheep mask and the gloves were both off. This man was not a preacher. He was a con artist not unlike a certain matriarchal parent. Shaun’s face was covered in blood and looked like a bare skull with a holy cross tattooed on his forehead. The face of a heavyweight boxer looked more pristine after one of his fights than Shaun’s did after thirty years of torture.

The savage giant stood up on both bare feet and slowly approached the frightened ophidiomancer. The cobra in Carlos’s hand would snap and hiss while the preacher himself kept chanting, “Get away from me! You’re nothing more than a foul beast! Be gone, sinner! Be gone!”

When Shaun got too close, the cobra finally struck. The little creature would have sunk its razorblade teeth into the giant’s chest if Shaun hadn’t instinctively grabbed its head and squeezed with all of his angry might. “Let him go!” shouted Carlos as he tried to pull the snake away. “He hasn’t done anything to anybody! He’s just an animal! He’s innocent! He’s the gateway to heaven!”

Carlos pulled too hard and snapped the snake’s smashed up head off. The goop, blood, and venom in Shaun’s hand was shaken off like a common stain. The preacher backed up until he was cornered against the stone well. Shaun lifted his hands offensively and smiled a devilish smile at his prey. When he reached down for his opponent’s throat, Carlos sprang back up and started punching and elbowing Shaun’s already bloodied up face. Sprays of thick red gunk splashed all over the now dead corpses of Carlos’s followers. After one too many strikes, Shaun fell backwards like a domino and snored heavily.

The ophidiomancer looked down at his victim with a wicked grin and laughed like this whole encounter was one big joke. He had life juices all over his arms as he held them to the sky and laughed like a maniac. “You see that?! I told you I was the one who was going to send you to heaven! But did you listen?! No, and that’s why you’re rotting in an eternal hell!”

Shaun sat up and glared at his attacker dead in his now frightened eyes. “No…no! How can you?! You’re just a demon! You’re a common sinner! You’re a fool!” shouted Carlos.

The giant nipped up to his feet and bull rushed Carlos back first into the stone well. While the preacher was struggling for air as Shaun held his throat, the giant said, “Truth is, Reverend, the only hell that exists for me is miles back there! If you want to know what a real fire pit looks like, I’ll be happy to show you!”

While Carlos was shouting “No!” repeatedly, Shaun reached into the well and pulled out yet another poisonous snake. With one hand firmly wrapped around the creature’s neck, he wrapped the body around Carlos’s throat and strangled him with brutal force. The preacher’s legs were dangling as he was being hoisted in the air by this ogre-like nightmare of a man. Oxygen only lasted for so long, but Shaun Goldberg’s newfound smile lasted forever.

The beauty of the afternoon passed into the chill of the night. The Goldberg family residence was little more than a beat up trailer with a shit-stained farm out back. Bursting the door open with a slab of red meat was a corpulent woman dressed in a pink bathrobe with bunny slippers. “Shaun! Rise and shine! It’s dinner time, you sack of shit! You’d better be up and awake before I bet your ass again!”

The matriarch of the Goldberg family kicked open the barn door and burst into tears at what she saw. It wasn’t her precious little boy in the bloody cage. It was her dear and beloved Reverend Carlos Pierre hanging by his own snake, lifeless as the corpses he collected that day. The mother sobbed and wailed as she waddled over to the dead body and hugged it tightly. “Oh, Reverend! I’m sorry my bastard boy did this to you! I know now that you’re in heaven!”

“Hello, mother dearest!” said a familiar gravelly monster voice. The bitchy mother slowly turned her head and saw that her “bastard boy” Shaun was standing in the doorway covered in live poisonous snakes. The mother dropped on her ass and continued to shed pathetic tears. The son? He had only one question: “What’s for dinner, momma?”

WWE Hell in a Cell: Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins

TITLE: WWE Hell in a Cell: Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins

GENRE: Professional Wrestling Match

RATING: TV-PG for moderate violence and brief language

GRADE: Pass

A Hell in a Cell match is more than a typical steel cage fight. In this case, the cage surrounds the entire ring and exposes the concrete floor. You can’t win the match by escape because there is no escape. It’s just you and your opponent inside a wire mesh cage with no rules or regulations to hold you back. As heel commentator JBL so appropriately puts it, the only limit to your attack is your imagination. Dean Ambrose has a wild imagination in case you couldn’t tell from his erratic behavior. Seth Rollins can be just as sadistic and crazy. The first Hell in a Cell match between John Cena and Randy Orton was…acceptable. But this main event match between Ambrose and Rollins was going to steal the show.

Normally a match of this caliber would start in the ring and the bell would sound off three times to start the battle. Dean Ambrose didn’t want that. Carrying a kendo stick like a samurai sword with him, he wanted to start on TOP of the cell. Seth Rollins along with his two stooges Joey Mercury and Jamie Noble were (kind of) happy to humor him. Mercury and Noble got kendo stick welts for their troubles and Rollins and Ambrose fell off the cage and crashed through the English and Spanish-speaking announce tables.

It could have been over before it started. Dean Ambrose didn’t want that ending. He got off of his stretcher and chased Seth Rollins down before throwing him in the cell to officially start the match. Once the bell rung three times, these two warriors brutalized each other. They used chairs, sticks, steel stairs, and wooden tables, all in an effort to achieve victory. Corporate Kane was outside the cell and interfered by blasting Ambrose in the face with a fire extinguisher. That didn’t cool off the fire in the Lunatic Fringe’s belly. He wasn’t just pissed off at Seth Rollins; he had a bloodlust for him. He wanted to torture and twist him in the most painful ways possible.

Dean Ambrose was so close to exacting his revenge when he put an unconscious Seth Rollins’ head on top of cinder blocks to set up for Rollins’ own finisher move, the curb stomp. And then the arena went black and strange tongues were being spoken with a lantern and a ghost in the center of the ring. The speaker of that tongues was none other than the hypnotic and frightening Bray Wyatt, who downed Dean Ambrose with a spinning face buster and allowed Seth Rollins to cover Ambrose for the 1-2-3 pin. The match is over, but the emotional scars bleed like waterfalls and the physical pains burn like hellfire.

And now for the actual critique. To put it shortly, this match was as violent and psychotic as anybody could ask for. The blood was minimal, but the pain was at its maximum with the creative use of weaponry and the multi-story fall from the start of the match. This wasn’t just a wrestling match; this was a fight for survival. Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins beat each other so badly after that fall it was amazing they didn’t have a hearse parked outside the arena. You’re damn right they were sore and bruised.

Believe it or not, the finish to the match where Bray Wyatt interfered didn’t bother me in the least bit. Yes, I wanted to see Dean Ambrose curb stomp Seth Rollins’ head into powder and slush. But then again, Bray Wyatt had been off of WWE television for a long time and needed a grand reintroduction. And now that the Hell in a Cell pay-per-view is in the books, we’re looking at a rivalry between Ambrose and Wyatt.

You know what that means? It means two crazies, two psychopaths are going to tear each other apart at some point. Dean Ambrose is like The Joker and Bray Wyatt is like Charles Manson. The two wrestlers have the mindset of serial killers and if they have to bleed each other out to get to the climax of their battle, well, let me put it his way: Seth Rollins is the luckiest guy on the planet. If these two loony tunes play enough mind games with each other for long enough, one of those minds will be running down a sewer drain while the other is bleeding with psychological trauma.

What you have to remember when watching WWE is everything happens for a reason. All you have to do as a fan is wait patiently for your favorites to triumph. It’s not an instant situation. It takes time for a climax to launch. Lots of time.

When Daniel Bryan was screwed out of the WWE Title at Summer Slam 2013, it took him until Wrestlemania XXX, which is an April 2014 pay-per-view to regain it. The point of this analogy is if you’re a fan and you want to see Seth Rollins get brutalized over and over again, but eventually for a final time, wait patiently. WWE waited patiently for Dean Ambrose vs. Seth Rollins to climax and it paid off in the most violent way possible, which is why this match in particular gets a passing grade.