Axes of Evil (A Gothic Political Fable)

I entered this into the Quad Cities' Iron Pen Contest, sponsored by the Midwest Writing Center.

Axes of (Good and) Evil
A gothic political fable

Carrie sped through the tv channels trying desperately to find something to watch without having to witness the nightly parade of horrors that now greeted her with evening news. Satellite TV wasn’t much better. Kardashians. Cartoons. CNN. CNN Global. CNN Entertainment – more Kardashians. CNN Sports with Caitlyn Jenner. Then there was the biggest horror of them all, the actual CNN, which featured a menacing orange guy every night talking about how he was going to fire everyone in the country and send them all to Mexico. The media. The comedians. The cabinet. This was ridiculous. Someone had to do something about this. Congress or John Gotti or the Virgen of Guadalupe. Or the media before they all became fearful for their very lives, the way dissidents in Soviet Union lived. Or live. She had lost track of Soviet politics, er, Russian politics, but she was pretty sure it was just as bad under Putin as it had been in the Soviet Seventies.

Carrie went to her closet and pulled out something heavy. She put it in a golf club bag and drove off. She drove for miles and miles and then she drove some more. Until she found herself half a continent away, pulling up alongside the house where the people stood night and day holding signs and chanting, some angrily, some hopeful, some with beads in their hands and others with clenched fists. She went some blocks away to park her trendy but old Nissan and struggled to take the bag out of the trunk. She went and joined a tour of the house that inspired so much protest. Naturally, she wouldn’t be able to get to the orange faced menace in chief, but if she could . . . “I’ll teach him some new golf swings,” she muttered under her breath.

She very quickly broke away from the tour, just like they did on television shows. She didn’t think it would be so easy. But since he had dispatched every possible available police and army-related personnel to make sure that Canadians were not climbing the wall from Mexico or wherever, and since they didn’t really care about someone so . . . . so . . . orange, the Secret Service were nowhere to be found. She crept around, looking over her shoulder, and peeked inside rooms of the large white mansion. Eventually she stumbled into what looked like the control room of a tv show. There were monitors everywhere. The orange person was looking at himself in a full-length mirror saying things like “Mr. Lincoln, you’re fired.” Suddenly, he spun around and saw Carrie at the door. He was about to demand to know what she was doing there when she reached into the golf bag and took out an axe.

The faithful civil servant that he was, the orange menace ran from the room. Surprised by her own strength, as well as the continuing lack of Secret Service, or anyone, for that matter, she swung the axe as she went down the hallway. Chopping at every door like Jack Nicholson meets Carrie Bradshaw, yelling “Where’s Donnie?” and checking herself in the glass. She chopped and chopped down all of the doors of the mansion that had seemed so large from the outside but now was growing ever smaller. She felt like Alice in Wonderland at some points, having eaten the mushroom or whatever it was and growing larger. But it truth, she was much more like her namesake, Carrie Nation, taking an axe to anything and everything that represented a threat to her freedom. Anything that made men drunk and a threat to her and her “fellow” women, whether it was Jack Daniels or their own sense of power and entitlement. She chopped and she swung and then she came to the Lincoln Bedroom.

There was a white-haired man with a square face standing at the edge of the bed, where Donnie the Menace lay, stabbed through the heart, panting out his last words and pointing at the square-faced man. “Lock . . him . . . up.” Meanwhile, she couldn’t be sure, but Carrie thought she saw the square faced man making mental notes, measuring for drapes and carpet, a gray-haired transgendered Jacquelyn Kennedy.

Then the square man spotted Carrie carrying the axe and a twinkle appeared in his eye. He lunged at Carrie, but she had already anticipated his move. They struggled for the axe. “Come on,” he screamed. “You know you wanted it.” As he reached down to try to grab her, saying “Donnie says you bitches like this” she reached for a can of mace and yelling at the nameless white-haired man she screamed “No means no!” With one quick movement, the axe fell on his neck. Repeatedly. The man’s square head kept talking for a few moments, calling her every vulgar name in the book, including the worst epithet he could think of. “FEMINIST!”

Carrie felt briefly like panicking. It seemed the thing to do in this situation. But Carrie had watched a lot of SNAPPED in her day, and she wasn’t about to make any rookie mistakes that would cause her to get caught. She quickly hatched a plan to dismember both bodies and dispose of them in a way that would not be traced back to her. It wasn’t like anyone was really going to look that hard for her. It could have been any one of 62,523,126 or more people. She stopped briefly to imagine the huge parade that might be thrown for her. Maybe there would even be a worker’s holiday in her honor. Carrie SNAPPED! out of her daydream and methodically went back to work. When she was done, she took the golf bag with her (no time to be sloppy now) and slipped into the tour again, this time joining a different group of tourists. She smiled slyly when thought she saw one of them wriggle out of the tour group.

When Carrie awoke, she heard the sound of workers with chain saws taking down old trees that had been blown down from last night’s windstorm. What a cliché. It was all a dream. Or maybe a tornado, like in the Wizard of Oz. And you were there, Ivanka. And you were there, Mike Pence. She grimaced. How stupid she had been. She looked under the bed and found her axe next to a bag of golf clubs that had been put there for some reason. Suddenly, she saw a large orange hairball drift across the room like a tumbleweed.

She turned on the television and gasped.