Least Likely to Succeed
Blessed Are the Ordinary
Edna was never "most likely to succeed." She would never change the world.
After cosmetology school, she worked at a nursing home applying makeup. This led to her job at a funeral home in Albany, when families of the ones she had beautified requested her again for an aesthetic afterlife.
Richard Taylor was smart, handsome, and likened to the Kennedys. After his law degree from NYU, he represented the people of Albany. From there, he ran for President.
When Taylor's mother died, she lay in her casket, stunning, because the mortician had recommended Edna. It was what made him insist on her for campaign debates: she lined his jowls to create the square jaw of authority, her brushes and shades rendering sincerity. Pundits claimed debate persona elected him.
Now she prepared him for his Presidential address. As she dabbed and brushed, President Taylor asked, "Tell me, Edna, how you think I did with that Taiwan crisis."
He knew how he did. In Kennedyesque flare, he forced China to back down. His speech tonight would be his victory lap.
“What do I think? Mr. President, what’s a beautician compared to the President?”
"I question, Edna, on a universal scale, any difference between the leader of the free world and a cosmetologist?"
“You’re the President! I’m nothing. The world’s not gonna change because of me. But you--anyone else might have caused World War III.”
Yes, the President had changed history. But it was Edna's makeup that had gotten him the Carolinas.
About the Creator
Gerard DiLeo
Retired, not tired. In Life Phase II: Living and writing from a decommissioned church in Hull, MA. (Phase I was New Orleans and everything that entails. Hippocampus, behave!
https://www.amazon.com/Gerard-DiLeo/e/B00JE6LL2W/
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Maltopia
My mother in this twisted version of the world I knew, Ol’ lady Ebe, sat all by herself under the same wall map. It was a world where North was South and Anarctica was the North Pole. Now the equatorial zones were obscured in part by the cloud of smoke that she had produced from the cigarette in her hand. Air quality over the southern hemisphere, too, was not good. She had polluted the whole planet that hung over her head while polluting the whole scene in the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen. Her face was no mean contender, either.
By Gerard DiLeo12 months ago in Fiction
Comments (1)
I love this on so many levels: the last line; the fact that so much is suggested in so few lines; the humour.