Penelle Magazine

STEP ONE

read the text, then read it again. feel your stomach drop, the trickle of summer sweat dripping down your spine, the low pulse of your childself’s vigilance accelerating from a whisper to a roar. not to open old shit but… old shit. is that what he is? a pollutant buried eight years deep, refusing to decompose? picture him as you knew him—the deep rot in his bones fossilized, the murky groundwater contaminated—and watch your childself sow seeds in his earth anyway, as if spring would ever come. click the link anyway. pick the scab, pour salt right in that wound.

STEP TWO

wait for the announcement to load.

STEP THREE

scroll through his half-baked website, his calls for closed borders and untaxed wealth, more police and wars and guns. family values. feel your muscles tense as your vision flickers to his closed bedroom door, his fingers slipping his condom off himself and then a pill into your childself’s drink—those same fingers tearing a striped t-shirt to shreds, shattering his phone screen, smashing dents in drywall and digging deep under your skin. clench your own fingers into fists and shake your head back and forth and back and forth until the signal is cut, until your skull is all that is moving. a special election indeed.

STEP FOUR

call your best friend—the one who knew him once but knows you now, who still indulges your fantasies about killing him over brunch and happy hour. she works in politics. hear her heartstrings snap for you, the dam of her rage break as she reminds you of things you already know: how futile his campaign will be in the bluest of blue towns, how his decision to run anyway screams of slimy desperation, how everyone who ever loved him hates him and thinks he is pathetic and is laughing at him now. cloak your childself in the confidence of her voice—a costume you have long outgrown, shrunk in the rinse-repeat of a decade’s headlines. pretend it still fits.

STEP FIVE

tell your parents, your little sister. make a show of talking through the shake in your voice, of ignoring the grim resignation in theirs. wonder if you should have told them nothing at all. spend the afternoon on your bed with your spouse’s arms around you, staring at the television screen until the actors’ faces blur together. dissociate through dinner. laugh in sleep’s face.

STEP SIX

consider coming forward again. your silence is ice, so thickened with the frost of four years that no trace remains of the sledgehammer you once took to it. you never named him, never went more public than a post to your private Instagram account—it must not have been enough, did not cast a large enough shadow over his grift. think of Anita Hill, of Christine Blasey Ford, of Amber Heard, of all the truths heavy on your bitten tongue. look up the definition of burden of proof, preponderance of evidence, reasonable doubt. slam your laptop shut.

STEP SEVEN

say nothing. do even less.

STEP EIGHT

dissolve the death of summer into a time soup, August sweating away into nothing as September hard-boils. stir in October, the putrid stench of it anything but a surprise.

STEP NINE

check your voter registration, your polling place. tell your childself that this November is not that November, that you are no longer a fledgling college kid flinching at slammed doors as he keeps your phone ringing and ringing and ringing, that now is not then even if the streets reek of his crass cruelty and the slogans sound the same. repeat it under your breath at the gym, at the supermarket, in the queue outside the elementary school on the slate-skied morning of election day. this time is different. you are safe and sound and sane. ignore the childself yelling back at you that it is not, you are not, you are not, you are not.

STEP TEN

turn off the news when they call Georgia. it does not matter where his race lands now, how many voters in his district unthinkingly choose the whitest malest name (so many), how many your testimony could have swayed in any other direction (not enough). he will lose but he has won anyway. his kind have taken root.

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Cailín Frankland (she/they) is a British-American writer and public health professional based in Baltimore, Maryland. Their cultural criticism, poetry, flash fiction, and short fiction have been featured in numerous print and online publications, including The First Line Literary Magazine, Eye to the Telescope (Rhysling finalist), Flash Frog Magazine (Best Microfiction nominee), Black Cat Tales: An Anthology of Black Cats, and meat2meat: Body Horror by Those Who Know It Best. They live with their spouse, two old lady cats, a rotating cast of foster animals, and a 70-pound pitbull affectionately known as Baby. You can find them on X as @cailin_sm.

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