Cartoons / The President
Cartoons
Could we solve income inequality in America by telling the cops we saw it trying to break into a car and then the cops would shoot income inequality in America in the face until it was dead? Would that also work for climate change? Maybe the secret police can come and deal with irreversible climate change and just like, shoot it in the face. God I sound like Sam. But also, just picture it: cops yell at climate change to go back where it came from while shooting climate change in the face, the secret police file out of vans and just black bag everything. The reputation of vans will never recover from this. Just tell them to pretend climate change is a cute brown six year old. Wow actually maybe if we told them climate change was wearing a hoodie and looked suspicious they’d do something about it. God. Is there even a point in staying employed when the world’s going to end? And then you know, you think, maybe you want a baby, and so then you have a baby, and it’s so beautiful, and you love it so much, you hold this beautiful daughter to your skin, which is basically made of love, in this moment, which is endless, or it seems endless, and she loves you so much, she looks you right in the eyes, and she smiles at you, and then she throws up all over your tits, and she looks you in the eye and says Why would you bring me into this world to die choking on hot poison air while a boiling sea drowns every dream I ever had? Why would you do that? I thought you were gonna protect me! I thought you loved me! And the baby is just screaming now I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME. OH! And then there are all those people out there who want the world to end so they can go up to heaven! Because this world doesn’t matter and if we kill it, if we make sure the world ends, then we can go to heaven forever. So that’s great. That’s fun. And oh my god the dinner Sam made! I could kiss him on the dick! Then the angels would come. They wouldn’t say anything. "They'd just sort of float there, glowering in judgment, and molting all over these rented hardwood floors. Fuck the angels. Fuck them. Fuck. We could actually see the world end. Why are we doing anything other than trying to make sure the world doesn’t end? Why?????????????????????????????????????? Eleanor can’t sleep. She turns over to Sam and says his name, “Sam,” to try to wake him up. Sam is a shitty sleeper. He needs all the sleep he can get. This doesn’t matter right now, though. It’s an extraneous detail, so don’t worry about it. Meanwhile Eleanor is saying “SAM” louder and louder. Sam rolls over onto her. This solves nothing. “This solves nothing” says Eleanor, while Sam lays flopped on top of her. She says “Sam, I cannot sleep.” Even if Sam could fall asleep again, he could not do it if Eleanor was up, and upset, because he would feel terrible for her, because she loves to sleep, and it breaks his heart when she’s sad. It just breaks his fucking heart wide open! So Sam gets up. Sam gets everyone a nice glass of cold water. Sam puts on an old cartoon where this clown goes into a mystery cave while the snow falls and a beautiful woman is in a glass coffin, and then a witch, flying on a mirror, puts her mirror over the clown like a net and then the clown’s a ghost, he’s in love, then everything’s chilly, it’s cold, it’s frozen over, there’s nothing but the snow. They watch a cartoon where a sad little ghost sits in a graveyard looking at pictures of animals til the other ghosts wake up, they try to get the sad little ghost to go around and spook everyone, they’re a bunch of ghost planes in the sky, dive-bombing homes for miles around, screaming BOO at everyone they hit, but the sad little ghost sees no future in any pain beyond his own, and he goes out to make friends, but everyone is terrified of him, due to him confronting them with not only their own mortality, but the possibility that Heaven is, if not a lie, at least inaccessible. Then he meets a skunk and the skunk freaks out, now he’s in the tub, he’s drying out on a log, he’s weeping. At this point the other ghosts hear his tears, and they pick him up, they fly him into town, he’s weeping, they drop him in the middle of a dance. It’s a Halloween dance! There’s a pretty girl dressed like a ghost, then everyone dies. Then there’s a mouse, who is in love with another mouse. He works all day making shoes so he can buy a nice dinner for this mouse he is in love with, but it isn’t enough! He has to wash the dishes to pay for the rest of the meal, and he is so embarrassed, he is weeping and washing the dishes, because nothing he can do will ever be enough! When all of a sudden, the mouse he is in love with shows up, and washes the dishes right next to him, and kisses him on the cheek. Then there’s a pig dressed as a cop out in his cop car and he gets shot in the face by a bandit! He does not find the bandit, so he goes to get an ice cream. While in line, he gets shot in the face, again! He arrests the whole store! He throws it in a sack and drags it over to prison! Everything goes black.
Everyone who worked on those cartoons is dead now. They’ve been dead for so long! Their children are dead, and their grandchildren are dead, and even their memories are dead, and they died drunk, and broke, and they put their whole lives into things that will outlive us all. When the dead animators’ wives, who are also dead, come home, it just takes their breath away. Someone put a fresh amaryllis in a beautiful vase. It is 3 feet tall and it keeps growing. It is blooming. The whole room is full of flowers now. In the next room is death. Death wears a white suit and white cowboy boots and a white bolo tie and such a fine white hat and has a horse’s skull, perfectly clean, for a face. Death loves it here, because it’s so beautiful. The flowers are everywhere. I hope we never have to leave.
The President
The president gets a haircut. It’s dawn. He calls his wife, who dies. It is pretty much a tragedy. Then he has lunch. It involves prawns. His mouth is absolutely, positively, full. Then there are meetings. The meetings suck. The gist of the meetings is that, right now, everything sucks. Oh well! Sometimes that happens! Now it’s night. In his bed, the president sleeps, alone, with the news. In the middle of the night the president is assassinated. In the morning, nothing changes. In the morning, the president wakes up in the body of an oil tycoon, but the oil tycoon dies. In the morning the president wakes up in the body of an international assassin who assassinates a president who is not this president, but is a president, and soon after that the international assassin is assassinated in a hotel by drowning in his bathtub alone. In the morning the president wakes up in the body of a high school quarterback seconds before a traumatic brain injury. Then the president wakes up in the body of a surface to air missile and just sits there for fifteen years until he dies blowing up a school, killing hundreds of children in a vaguely sanctioned air strike. The president weeps alone in a room for waiting while angels pretend not to notice. They contain a malicious sort of grace. Meanwhile, the president wakes up in the body of a tuba player the president wakes up in the body of the news the president wakes up in the body of debt itself, which will consume us all, and he lives like that forever until the world ends and then, after the world ends, the president wakes up in the body of the beach at sunset on the most romantic night of your life. Everything goes dark. The president wakes up in the body of the president but he has to go. The president is ripped away from us all. That’s it for the president! See you next week!
Sasha Fletcher is the author of, most recently, it is going to be a good year (Big Lucks Books, 2016). He lives in Brooklyn. @sasha_fletcher
