Unregulated

“I don’t think I can do this,” she said with tears in her eyes. Streaks of eyeliner and mascara ran down her right cheek, and both of her eyes were completely blackened with smeared makeup.

“Well, um...we really have to…we really need to,” I told her, looking down at my feet, looking anywhere but at her face, into her eyes.

“Hey, look at me!” she screamed. “Look up here. Yeah…look around, all right? Look around you! It’s February, for chrissake! Nobody votes in February! Nobody has ever voted in February! Look around! The trees are just getting buds, goddammit! Life is just beginning, the season is just getting ready to start, right? Oh, my God. It’s just…I just…nobody votes in February! Ok‽ Oh, my gawd! I just want to die!”

She turned and grabbed me close, buried her face in my blue and gray sweatshirt, pounded her fist into the North Face emblem on my unzipped Thermoball jacket.

I hugged her, sniffed her hair, and spoke softly into the top of her head. “You don’t want to die, babe. And I sure as hell don’t want you to die. Where would I be…?”

“I wouldn’t even know who to vote for,” she wailed.

“I’ll help you,” I said feebly. Though I wasn’t sure I knew who to vote for, either. There wasn’t anybody on the ballot I’d ever heard of, that’s for sure.

Some would be civic-minded folks, sure. Good, viable candidates wanting to do their duty in our great, unprecedented, historic time of need. I could already see them: straight-faced, stern women and men. Strong and composed—some of them modeling optimism, even—putting on their game faces all around, trying to act as if it were perfectly normal, just part of the everyday routine to suffer such great loss and devastation and then have a general election at the tail end of winter.

Undoubtedly, though, there would be the others, too. The opportunists.

God, I can’t imagine what kinds of nefarious bottom dwellers are going to come crawling out of the woodwork to take advantage of this situation. I don’t even like to think about it. I just wish they’d figure out some way to get us internet, or TV, or something that could give us more, tell us more.

“I don’t want to see it,” she said, pushing away from me and looking up into my face. “I know you do, but I don’t. I don’t want to see it in pictures, on TV, on the internet. Nothing.”

And just as she’d finished saying it, a bearded man in a tattered, hoodless military parka rode slowly by on a three-wheeled bicycle. He was pulling behind him a homemade trailer, which also had three wheels on it. Atop the cart was a poster board mounted on what appeared to be three different-sized broom handles. On the poster, the rider—or maybe some other unknown, unnamed artist—had completed a hand-drawn sketch of a smoking, charred hole in the ground, and a flat, oval-shaped area of devastation all around it. Behind the hole was an eerie, wavy shadow in the shape of the US Capitol building.

We watched him as he rode peacefully by, then away and away, down the avenue until he turned and was out of sight.

After several long seconds of stunned, immobile silence, Molly turned quickly back toward me, buried her face in my chest again, and started pounding on me, screaming into my already tear-stained and mascara-smeared Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt.

I held her tightly and we rocked back and forth in time to her mournful sobs.