I Heart Oklahoma!

by Roy Scranton

  The Resistance

  “Anybody need a trigger warning?” Jane asked. “Things are gonna get rapey.”

  Smoke erupted out of the ground, and Mark Zuckerberg entered, only slightly twitchy, in a quilted shadow-blue Dries Van Noten dress. “Tomorrow come the SJWs at Cold Harbor,” he boomed. “Kännykkä, Kännykkä! Or cut your throats!”

  Zuckerberg turned to face east. While some were silent during the sacrifice, others made noises and ridiculous speeches, imitating the cock, the squirrel, and the turtle, and Jesse thought this is where it begins, following the stage directions: “Respect animals and make all kinds of noises.” Two roast deer were distributed to stupid people. (They work the hind legs independently.)

  “The hands braced, here to cry!” Mark Zuckerberg shouted. “I came to make big things happen!”

  The Wall lifted and a shell came slowly up and for a moment the turtles were calm. They made people want to have their skin inside the shell, clamped in sideways. For a long while the turtles lay there, then Caitlyn Jenner stood, facing Zuckerberg but speaking to Jesse: “I will throw myself through the fake news! Come up, #metoo sister! Come up and be our honeylamb!”

  Jesse started to hir feet, canonized, topless in hir Jonathan Simkhai jeans, as if ze had absolved hirself of description. Then ze spoke. “I will be his righteous angel,” ze chanted, “and I will watch by his side as the Wind Son carries it off.”

  Dust drifted up out of the fields and ze left the room and locked the door behind the sluggish smoke. The corn threshed hir, ignoring hir shrieks of protest. We heard sounds, but the finest dust did not settle the phone ringing in the background, and before ze could summon the energy to scream into the darkening sky, hir mind wind grew, whisking us swirling into the future, and ze fell back onto the even little clods, marking how the sky had shifted.

  Lift Yourself Up

  You expected something more Western? Haven’t you had enough white-settler colonialism? They was out front of Jane’s farmhouse, trending a Tom Ford tuxedo. “It was a radiant summer morning,” said Kanye.

  Kanye’s relations with Zuckerberg had been strained of late. Some alleged the problem was that they shared a jock, others that it was #ziotears and bicoastal hip-hop rivalry. The territory was cow chaos all over, and the blades of young corn made their own drum line, marching, images giving off a gothic high, as though mind were fundamentally part true and partly a trick of the imagination, a legal and literary shell game, a Bottega Veneta polo top and Michael Kors Collection pencil skirt.

  The problem is deeper than the failure of narrative. The problem is to know when to stop rainbow puking.

  “Homicide,” Jack said to Jesse, watching Taylor struggle with a mink-collared dialectic. “Seven years of bad sex, but I’m sprung in four and the tractor’s ours. You know not all Jews are Marxists, right?”

  Jesse handed Taylor a towel. “I never saw cage children listening like that with the Wind Son.” Ze shook hir head. “Tragic . . .”

  The night drew down the minstrel’s Alexander McQueen dress, custard to charcoal to indigo. Jack smiled. “That’s entertainment,” he said. “But when you been humping it up in White Castle from hell to breakfast . . .” He spat, goaded at last by Jane’s silent ridicule. “See to her requirements,” he said to Jesse. “Give her the super subtitles.”

  “I’d shed the dirt-road action myself,” ze said, not unsympathetically. “That’s just the look today.”

  ALL (singing) Reterritorialization fucks should trump together

  in dignity, diabolical!

  We shall be the very territory,

  and folks should all be pals!

  It’s killing us,

  this quintessence of decorum.

  Cowboys dance with the farmers

  and nobody’s talking ass of the first water

  until pedantry and sentiment cry

  “Thanatos! Thanatos!”

  The road opened at right angles, free the rest of hir life. Vertical exhaust integration. Immigrant voter rolls. Curious blue smoke.

  Jane leaned in the damnable data, remembered: “It was a dangerous burden to carry while vast numbers of Americans thought castles needed to be razed. And for what reason other than they was there? So be it. We’re all weaning ourselves off bespoke economic growth. So be it.”

  The whole time, Kanye was still singing his trade-war anthem, riding that llamacorn around. He did lariat tricks, too, and practiced his “Yipee-ki-yay, motherfucker.”

  Taylor pumped her fist and shouted, “Goin’—goin’—gone! Whut’s the word? It’s open!” She looked around at the silent faces of the cage children. “Ain’t nobody gonna cheer er nuthin’?”

  Uncertain, they started singing “The Farmer and the Cowman,” and shared with news deep in themselves that no one being a real guy, men were clones. But women? We’ve been differentiated from what’s best in us.

  Many a New Day

  And when the sun went down ill and the time passed to drain the swamp, you’d been thinking maybe the Confederate VA financed Trump’s campaign. The truth is, we owe our veterans, who were extremely happy to have him. His sole idea was if the hospitals couldn’t do personal memoirs, then the money people would go to private doctors and win the country. BIG LEAGUE CHEW.

  Taylor put her finger to Jack’s lips. “They is that fine,” she said. “And they ain’t got none of that resentment toward the intellectual dark web.”

  Jane lost the conversation as she entered the house, thinking, It’s a house fur a house, an’ a bullet fur ice. She had on a Sacai coat and skirt—mash-up of earthy tweed and electric emerald—and stylish Spanish bistre Louis Vuitton boots. It promised my house burnt, and she would have liked a balcony view, but the fact of the matter is, he explained, the cows of pseudoephedrine sin and the river’ll whippit the meth plastic pushing up from the highway and whisper over and over: Don’t you wisht y’d go on fer #Pizzagate updates and clandestine meetings in Chewbacca Mom’s love grotto, though it might have been that Taylor and Jane changed places when they put The Word in where it couldn’t be blockchained, nice but clinical, typical, exciting, having a hard time, getting tough, making opioids for the New Confederate Army, a Paco Rabanne dress and Hermès scarf. When becoming a bestie was a controlled substance, bromance doxed their superthighs. The Red Hen meth cook, a New York native, sang the “Song of the South” at a wild party to a lot of young, educated, Wharton School of Finance types and numerous pseudo-representations of different traditions. Walmart’s got all the cultures in every gender.

  This you can know: the dirt broke to suffer and die for a concept, a thing—res extensa et res cogitans—lifted from the dust into the air. At last it would take no responsibility for womanself, and this one quality is man and woman and wagon lifted, they were women and slaves and robots, while the automobile boiled the iCloud behind time. Some of the stateless, nervous under the rain, became servants of cold power, saying, “How could I not?”

  Stormfront Pokémon moved up out of Texas and Kellyanne Conway explained the polling: You know the land and the land is grand. The women in the fields looked up. The Dust God turned the image of held wet fingers, added and wondered and drew figures, then nobody wanted to live in Oklahoma nomore.

  We heard they would cut employees to get necessary bud. Nobody knows how to control the border or has the nerve to keep Trump’s ICE from meeting its requirements. The people perpetrated their own offices, beholden to la migra, and Trump attacked the lab results. They hated government accountability to a man, so I sent the cast of Saturday’s Russian subpoena to the FBI for comparison (letting the Supreme Court watch), because even with a strong push there could still be three million arrests live-tweeting Hamilton.

  After a trip back in time from all over, the pigshit sinks in through the bump stock and we wonder for long minutes if there’s something the magnet school can bl
aze or vape. The woman had been beautiful to the highest bidder (in an orange Versace puffer coat), all dimension and proportion to the end, a worthy sacrifice to the anti-vaxxers. It was her get-out-of-jail free card. Then she was dead and gone.

  “The wavin’ wheat of time sure can smell,” Jane said, “surging where the Wind Son comes sweepin’ down on FEMA. Ain’t we s’pposed to git some kinda national e-clips? The idear’s got me all out of whack caw.”

  Jack took the hint. He looked up, shielding his eyes. “It’s already started.”

  He was right: the rough moon was quietly carving my honeylamb. The president crossed the sun, darkening the crime scene; the old woman left.

  “Eerie,” Jane said into her vagina. “He reached Savannah. Others, too.”

  Jack looked back at her, coding as his father had done and his father before him, and the soldiers continued with their own powerful ethnic spring, bringing self-respect to a succession of neighborhoods, regions, subregions, and nations, fighting words of the earlier causes.

  The Rape Metaphor

  As we came to dinner, looking good in Calvin Klein 205W39NYC classic straight-leg marching-band pants and matching sleeveless tops in spite of being sick, run-down, and sleepless for more than two years, we couldn’t help but notice the dessert. (Take plenty of water in case you work nights.)

  Taylor Swift, casually making trouble in cutoff jeans, a long-sleeved unitard, and a Vetements quilted coat, was free as a Tennessee T-shirt. Her bare feet revealed a nice coozy little peace, toenails polished hooker red, and a body to bother you with. Artistic a bit, though she didn’t seem the type. We were surprised.

  “I’m t’ard of all these bitches,” Caitlyn Jenner complained.

  “We need to do which lives matter,” said the Reporter. “Like it or not, these are not our kids.”

  Jane walked. For a moment the wind driver stared after. Jack changed the radio to bureaucracy, while climate skeptics implied gears clicked, and the great red truck Individual Liberty drove on.

  America’s Sweetheart looked at herself, grand diversion of sorry-not-sorry, a pair of red stockings and Hunter rain boots, a red-girdled spectacle, one singing with infectious enthusiasm. Around her neck, a red ribbon intercut with a dash of everything had changed. Now what do you think of paid consultants, a stirring vocal arrangement, and the accepted sense of The Word? Upon those endangered lives what could she do, a grand piano and a tawny camlet, laced along the wrists, momentum of the trans neoliberal bubble hell, naked? The gold-medal points made welts on our thighs.

  But she didn’t see success as “all that.” This gal was on a spree—a very calculated accomplishment. Every death had meaning. Each placement of the body was intentional. She wasn’t some little boy with dyslexia. She had faithfully left many physical clues besides the semen, from which we knew she’d been born scripture. Somebody got raped while the world was at its killing, then placed at the Parthenon and shrouded in herbs.

  “Do I?” she said to herself. “I do.”

  A spokesperson irresistible to the starved grain felt the dry earth with hir fingers, a loving gesture. Now, watching uneasily, we find out Taylor’s pregnant in the dooryard of no idea. There’s a fatherhood theme going on and the last owner dove in. The one who’ll help generate buzz about the new mutants meanwhile squatted outside, saying: “Full-employment Jane is my girl, and I can feel good about having done a hard thing.”

  What I Have Seen Functions Like a Cult

  The floor recognized Taylor Swift, resplendent in her tiered Monsoori gown. After all, she’d survived the Bowling Green Massacre, despite being reported missing by her phone.

  There was a ripple of laughter throughout the experience of the New Civil War. It was, by force of circumstance, the finest water Jack had ever tasted. The problem of faith cured one of his languages, namely the long rustic winding apocalyptic social justice appeal he’d enlisted at the beginning of the campaign and piled on the Virginians.

  “The curse of that,” he whispered to Siri, “is that I couldn’t enjoy my success. All the dreams I’d had as a young man had come true. And I still couldn’t enjoy it. It was never going to be enough.”

  At the top, Trump’s ephebes smelled the hot stinging air of civility, characterized by the bird’s flutter and the bat’s fall, and many readers came out inside his cage children. They settled on roofs in black-and-white Balmain knit dresses to enjoy bland success and acquisitive values. Pools in the rocks formed as they would have after a rain.

  If the definition of democracy is to represent the ruined corn dying fast, then screen views are a film of dust. The New York Times issued them anyway, and the majority of women went back to the basics, maybe just a burgundy Maison Mayle silk dress, some Dolce & Gabbana black suede pumps, and a trucker hat from the Kum & Go.

  Taylor recovered from her surprise. “Oh . . . yeah . . . well, Trump’s okay. I love him all right, I guess.”

  “Of course you do!” Jenner said, throwing on a floral print Tory Burch wrap. “You love those clear blue monster eyes of his, the way his mouth kills the land with cotton. He’s strong as an ox!”

  Jane yanked the wheel, swinging the car into nothing, while a swarm of predatory AIs decided not to go through with the irreversible hormone drone expansion set loose on the hapless South.

  “The issue is the TMZ disclosure in her contract,” Jack said. “Had Taylor a moral obligation to anything more than her own time line?”

  Taylor heard them whizzing by her head, felt the heat, actual hate spent on chaste houses as they ripped her hair. She watched Kanye verb a celebrity chef for a bubblegum-pink shearling Celine carryall. “Go down!” she screamed, clawing at him. The big-ticket hand reached into the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, and that’s what the alt-right really means: a narrow shadow over the Donald, an’ they pulled his face off an’—

  “Great Godamighty!” Jack shouted. “Don’t you wonder what it’s like out there?”

  Right behind, close as a mule’s ass, they’s fright in his eyes big as dimes. See it a-winkin’?

  “You’re lying,” Jane said. “I can reimburse the doctors and still fulfill our obligation to the Wall. Bullet right through, slick as a whistle. Didn’t I drown the muddy flux? I’m from the west edge, boy. For many questions, the answer is formation, but one kind of answer was the suggestion that America’s multicultural present stands at the bridge silent while volcanoes burn. If I live the comedown from the past, so be it.”

  She turned and gestured along the highway, out West, introducing the Nike FE/NOM Flyknit Bra and Roger Vivier slides. “And there rises the dead dream,” she said. “I come to embolden other dissenters, reading slowly, overwhelming him in his chair, sowing antagonist questions—or maybe forging a political climate in which paradise policies are affirmed, coming back, as I always do, to begin again.”

  “It would mean a rise in racial conflict,” Trump said, grabbing her pussy, “but if we pass the tax jam, most people will think I won. Then we can have a real job resurgence, at least for people with meetings in Washington.”

  She stepped down or never voted and, throwing on a Fendi stole, rushed immigration. He managed to get his feet under him and plowed into her. He dragged her toward the Wall, arms locked around her shoulders.

  She fought him and they grappled a long time, until his weight and frenzy started to overpower her. One step closer, then another, and then the gun was her guts telling us those murders were related and, listening, she shoved Trump back with all her strength, suddenly uncaught.

  Meanwhile, down Hillsboro Road they pulled into a half-dozen incel clones standing in the Pancake Pantry parking lot, threshing slowly through, salutes shelling over the grass, not really so popular that an hour wait wasn’t a drag. Their barley beards were uncommon these days, but on this brisk morning the line was water, and clover burrs fell blessedly absent. They had to wait ten minutes for
the Donald’s disappointed, fierce, humorous eyes to partly open.

  Zuckerberg moved closer to his own conclusions, though he was still at a loss. Readers also complained. One remarked: “Donald Trump could act, but sometimes he made one doubt his racist intentions.”

  Since then the Reporter had been laughing, saying, “It’d be a fine city if nobody did the monster.” They goggled and muzzled him, but did 4Chan say he felt the ingrained paraphrase? No. He evaded wanting a binge-worthy stream, since as it was he could smell everything becoming obstructive: “I read you expressing something happening internally. It doesn’t mean any of the clods feel the warmth from a sad, frustrated-man perspective.” (Do more with gender issues, race, the extension of his power.)

  “All right then, you silly ole woman,” Jack shouted. “I’ll dance till you’re his, dance you all over the meadow! You want this show?”

  “Pick ’at banjo to pieces, Kanye!” Caitlyn Jenner screamed.

  Mysterious. It lured a crowd, and the dance was on, everyone dancing now. Jack took requests, tens of thousands taking Taylor Swift by the waist and swinging her around in every direction on a daily basis. She’s doing it for the party—every party—in her Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello gloves.

  Jeté Entrelacé (Style Russe)

  The car screams what song? America. He remembered five nights breaking away to create a bad idea. It was: “Fire burns. That’s the first law.”

  Zero miles almost stupid. It might take several days even for the most brilliant heroes of water, film, and digital storage. Jane, making America late again, had married the daughter of Doctor Occupy Puerto Rico, while Scandinavian, Latin, and Balkan Converse models splashed old mayo on her Bibhu Mohapatra skirt. Startled in an old doorway, Jack told her she was slaying life.

  Rivers of mud and rivers of concrete, the sea it don’t take sight to see there in front of them, devoting themselves to this honeylamb’s end, massed flocks of black-eyed beasts so blood orange like candy, exemplification of principles shaking the earth sky, the buffalo, the passenger pigeon, polyurethane, and communion, hardly altered with the agonies of sin and salvation fed by flooding rivers, roamed and ruled by the Dust God, irrespective, blinding, alone.