The Referendum by Frances Hope

The Referendum

by Frances Hope

The embarrassing part of it was that no one had rigged the election. The folks firmly seated on either side of the political aisle as well as the ones dancing and stumbling back and forth across it had come together in an organic demonstration of unity.

When it became clear on election night that Independent candidate James “Jim” Spell had won the presidency, capturing every single state and over 90 percent of the popular vote, people in cities and towns across America had flooded the streets. Friends and strangers held each other close, like they’d just come home from fighting a world war.

Alex, along with everyone else, had voted for Spell. For all she knew, the Democratic incumbent had voted for him. His concession speech had verged on being a panegyric.

In the days leading up to Spell’s inauguration, Alex had felt a glow inside, a pleasurable sensation that was private and personal, even though she could see in the smiles around her that others felt it too.

“Happy almost inauguration day!” she’d said with a grin to the cute barista, watching him steam up the milk for her morning latte.

“Can’t wait,” he’d said with a wink.

She left the coffee shop that day with the same spring in her step that had buoyed her for weeks—as she’d traveled to and from the humble arts nonprofit she and a couple of friends had started years ago while they were still at UC Davis; as she’d bought groceries at the co-op; and as she’d walked Maxine, her gray terrier mix with a penchant for trying to bite his way through the chicken wire fences that enclosed the neighborhood vegetable gardens.

But Spell had kept his mask on only as long as he’d had to before discarding the façade of the dreamer-slash-realist who was folksy yet sophisticated, kind yet fierce, environmentally conscious yet sensitive to Americans’ need for fuel and plastics.

Once the Bible had been whisked away, the brand-new president had used his inaugural address to let the public know exactly what he planned to do. There would be no more elections after this one, he’d seen to it. There would be no more press, he’d seen to it. There would be no more public education, public benefits, or public funding for the arts or transportation. There would be bare-minimum federal funding for public works. Effective immediately, there would be no more institutions of higher education.

He didn’t care if you were White, Black, gay, straight, cisgender, transgender, female, male, you could feel free to be whoever you were—Well, that’s something at least, Alex’s shell-shocked mind had thought, somehow teetering toward a sort of makeshift Stockholm Syndrome after her new president had only been speaking for six minutes—but you needed to shut up about it and do what you were told. Because if you caused problems, you’d be gone. He’d see to it.

The speech was over in under ten minutes, after which Alex and the group of friends who’d convened at her bungalow for wine and cupcakes with little American flags on toothpicks sat in nauseous, stunned silence.

“Is he pranking us?” Alex’s friend Martha asked, just before the room shook with the blast that they later learned was from a B-21 Raider dropping a smart bomb on the university’s administration buildings.

In the days after the inauguration, Alex’s mind kept returning to the image of fish squirming in a barrel as bullets pierced the water. The American people simply hadn’t been able to conceive of a power grab this sudden and all-encompassing. Its first wave was over before those who survived it had had a chance to take a breath of water through their quivering gills.

Content from the nationally broadcast SPEL 32 News, the only remaining channel, had made it clear in the month since the inauguration that President Spell’s primary aim was to live comfortably with his family in the White House for as long as it pleased him. He might seek to escape boredom and ensure his untouchable status with official acts of sadism, but he wasn’t an ideologue, nor did he have a vision for America other than that he would govern it from a position of absolute control.

Alex sometimes laughed at the absurdity of seeing people, including herself, moving through their daily tasks as if they weren’t all on borrowed time. Other than cutting off the university’s head, President Spell hadn’t yet turned his attention toward their little city—but Alex knew that he would, if the collapsed economy didn’t find them first. For now, though no one wanted to risk sending their kids to school after what SPEL 32 showed them had happened in Michigan, pop-up home education centers emerged throughout the city. People who still had jobs went to work. Alex still got her latte from the cute barista, who looked like he’d aged fifteen years overnight. People were kind to each other. People were so abjectly terrified that they’d crossed over into not feeling scared at all.

One Thursday evening, as Alex watched SPEL 32, a special notification appeared on the screen. Alex had just been imagining that the blonde, dead-eyed news anchors must be kept in a Ben Franklin–era dungeon somewhere when they weren’t on camera, when the words appeared, written in Declaration of Independence font over a background of the new American flag.

President Spell would speak directly to the nation, on camera, on Sunday night. His first address since the inaugural. Alex realized she was sobbing only after her face and shirtfront were soaked with tears.

The idea came to her as water poured down her back a few minutes later. She’d already needed a shower, having waited a couple of days since the last one to conserve water, but she also disliked the feeling of salty tears drying on her skin. When it emerged, the idea—as simple as it was—appeared as a 3D model in her mind’s eye, one she could turn this way and that, to see it clearly from all sides.

But by the time she could no longer justify the waste of water and turned off the tap, she realized she’d only been having a shower dream. Magical thinking facilitated by the hypnotic patter of the cascading water.

She hadn’t intended to mention the idea to anyone, ridiculous and fantastical as it was, yet the next morning, on her walk with Maxine along the path that bordered her neighborhood, she couldn’t resist sharing it with the first person she encountered.

“You know how politicians used to say issues should be decided at the ballot box?” she said to Randall, whose golden retriever, Champ, leapt and rolled with Maxine.

Randall, an older man whose daughter lived back at home with him now that she could no longer work for the university, adjusted his cap and said, “Yep.” Alex saw tears in his eyes, and wanted to stop talking, but couldn’t.

“Well, I had an idea yesterday that maybe we should just make our own ballot boxes with our minds. Like, that’s what we’ve got to work with, right?”

“Are you suggesting we imagine we’re voting . . . him . . . out of office? Because—” Randall looked equally annoyed, confused, and concerned that Alex had gone off the deep end.

“No, I was thinking more like if we as a people, across America, decided to crush President Spell’s trachea during the address on Sunday, maybe we could do it.”

“With our minds,” Randall said. He definitely thought Alex had gone insane, and frankly, Alex wasn’t so sure that she hadn’t. But she pressed on.

“Yes. Worst that happens, it doesn’t work. Best case scenario . . . it does.”

“That’s not particularly democratic of you,” Randall said, finally forcing a chuckle to—Alex figured—give her an out and allow her to play this off as a joke. “Solving political violence with violence.”

Alex kept it to herself that if she and President Spell were alone in a dark alley right now, she didn’t think she’d lose too much sleep over taking a piece of brick or glass from the ground and using it to tear into that vulnerable trachea herself.

“I admit it’s violent, but I don’t think it would work unless almost everyone watching was in on the plan. It would be the ultimate vote.” She wrapped Maxine’s leash around her palm to signal that she was ready to move on. She felt restless, needing to continue the walk, to spread the good word to others, too. “I know it sounds bonkers, but please consider telling at least one more person today about the whacky idea you heard on your walk this morning. And when you watch President Spell on Sunday, just imagine, try to really, really picture it, his trachea imploding. Like, let’s just crush that sucker at the three-minute mark. Unless you don’t want to do that, politically, which I disagree with but ultimately must respect.”

Alex was surprised to find that she was enjoying herself. Seeing Randy’s bewilderment as he said his goodbye had elicited her first real, not even rueful, laugh since the inauguration—though she’d managed to contain her chuckle until after he was out of earshot. She thought he might tell at least one more person, and she had a feeling she’d be telling just about everyone she saw today.

Alex was sure that in Sunday’s speech, President Spell would unveil some new, previously unimaginable horror. So why not spread a little hope while she still could?

“Happy trachea day!” the cute barista said with a grin as he handed Alex her latte.

“Can’t wait,” she replied, as a smile that she knew looked bloodthirsty spread across her face. We’re actually going to try this thing, she thought.

The few people Alex had seen on her walk to the coffee shop this Sunday morning, still many hours before the evening’s presidential address, had looked privately contented, the way they all had just before the inauguration.

Now heading back home, she thought of the calls she’d made to friends out of state, the ones who’d scattered after college but with whom she’d kept in touch, telling them her idea and inviting them not only to spread the word but also to join her in collapsing President Spell’s trachea at 7:03 p.m. tonight. She wondered what the mood was in cities and towns across the nation right now. She wondered whether President Spell would sense that his subjects were suffering a little less today, and whether someone trying to curry favor had told him what Americans had in store for him tonight.

He doesn’t give a rat’s ass if we like him or not. Alex sipped her drink as she walked, Maxine bumping comfortably against the side of her calf every few steps. He might take our phones away after this, but he won’t think we pose any real danger to him.

Alex pushed aside the anticipatory grief she felt, imagining not being able to call her parents out in Tennessee ever again. Better to focus everything on tonight, and deal with the fallout later. I’m thinking like a madwoman, she thought, and laughed.

The trachea day party at Alex’s place got off to a raucous start. It was the first time anyone had been in her bungalow since the inauguration, and she and her friends were hell-bent on keeping the PTSD at bay with gallows humor, manic dancing and singing to pop songs of their youth, and eating way too many cupcakes with little American flags in them.

When President Spell appeared on the screen at exactly seven o’clock, Alex’s friend Martha had to go throw up in the sink.

President Spell said, with a wink that was in itself an act of violence, that he would have been “crushed” if the American people hadn’t tuned in tonight, and Alex knew that they were in for it if he survived.

Alex was relieved when Martha rejoined the group with a minute to spare, not knowing whether she’d be able to help flatten the president’s trachea if she wasn’t looking directly at the man on the television.

With fifteen seconds to go, according to the stopwatch on her phone, Alex knew with certainty that this wasn’t going to work, and that President Spell’s retribution would be much, much worse than anything that had come before.

They reached the three-minute mark.

“Now,” Alex whispered, as if everyone else hadn’t also been tracking the time on their own phones. As if they hadn’t all fallen silent when the time came. As if President Spell himself hadn’t shot them with a finger gun the moment the clock turned, evidence that he, too, had been watching the time on his own monitor.

His voice, strong at the midway point of announcing that select groups of children would be relocated to DC without their families for “essential civic education,” suddenly tapered. The sound was something like that of a balloon, inflated but untied, let loose by a child who has just un-pinched her fingers.

Alex had been concentrating just on his trachea, that fleshy tube she could perfectly visualize thanks to her gleeful perusal of anatomical drawings in preparation for tonight. But President Spell’s whole throat constricted, caught in an invisible vice, its diameter halved.

As President Spell’s eyes bulged—as he, by some miracle still standing, grabbed at his throat before collapsing out of the camera’s view—the room around Alex erupted.

Champagne was spurting, splashing everywhere before Alex realized that she had been the one to uncork the first bottle. There were no words, just joyful screaming and hugs and jumping on couch cushions. Alex had had the good sense to lock Maxine in her bedroom, but she could hear the terrier barking as if she, too, was glad that President Spell was dead.

For just a moment, Alex felt as though she was viewing the scene playing out in her living room from a spot on the cottage cheese ceiling above—watching herself and her friends in a state of rapture at having violently killed the man they’d elected through a free and fair election not so long before. America might or might not recover from the Spell presidency, she thought, but there was no question that they would be changed after having done this.

There was no coming back from crushing a man’s trachea with the power of America’s collective will. There was no telling what this would mean for society and the people in it, no telling how or what they would think about themselves after filling that man’s eyes with blood. But right now, in this moment, by god did democracy feel good.

THE END

Frances Hope

Frances Hope is a mystery, thriller, and speculative/horror writer living in Greater Boston. As a young child growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, she loved writing disturbing horror fiction, when she wasn't obsessively rereading her favorite book on how to be a kid detective. Find her online at www.franceshope.com.