Connor Coyne

When King Midas announced his intention to run for the Republican Presidential nomination everyone assumed it was a publicity stunt. After all, he had a variety of products, venues, and enterprises, and the grand sum of everything considered together was somewhere close to breaking even. That’s why Midas coveted gold.

He surprised the world twice.

He surprised them first when he accepted the challenge and won the nomination and, incredibly, won the actual election.

He also surprised them the very next day, when he developed the remarkable power to transform anything he touched into gold. But since this is the world we live in and not a Greek myth, we know that everything is connected by a tight web of matter and energy, light and dark. And so, in less than a blink, a second, and without recognition, the whole universe turned to gold. It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary couple billion years.

A bomb went off.

That’s okay. It was just a P-Funk album.

Everyone wiped the sweat off their brows and proceeded to get down.

It was a good night.

The writer became increasingly stressed out. Mephistopholes was standing in the corner and he knew that he was two minutes away from getting another soul on his ledger.

Catholic Roulette.

Iota, Louisiana is somewhere out in the swamps between New Orleans and Houston. It is a speck, unknown, and by custom, creole, cajon, cajoling, bizarre, it is not generally known by outsiders. This is where Andrew went to escape February and high school. Back in Cleveland, February had pursued him from year to year, the death dirge of winter, long before spring became a real thing, impartially vindictive, objectively callous, cruel, careful, ruthless, death and death. He thought he would escape it in Louisiana. And high school pursued him. Without a college degree, without any jobs in his burnt out town, he felt stuck in the moment of the closest success he had ever known; honor roll grades and appreciative teachers, and girls that admired him even if they did not love him.

Iota was meant to be an escape. It wasn’t long before he realized that the bayou has all kinds of death he didn’t know and wouldn’t have recognized through his rust belt eyes. Death is just beneath the brackish surface, and more creatures lived a short life here. If his high school moments seemed futile, they were something next to the strange language and accents he could not access.

So he spent summer nights in his hammock and dreamed about Cleveland and February, and drank himself asleep.