Wake Up and Open Your Eyes

by Clay McLeod Chapman

On their rare holiday father-son chat, Dad sounded like he was rehashing poorly written conspiracy theory fan fic.

Their chyron flashes BREAKING NEWS, but isn’t news always breaking nowadays? Isn’t the news all broken by now? Smashed to bits?

Fax didn’t make him feel stupid. Fax just made him feel.

Life has presented its own apocalyptic Choose Your Own Adventure for Fragile Democrats, and if you don’t start making better choices, dare we say conservative choices, you’re going to flip to the next page and realize your narrative has come to an abrupt end before it even starts.

Marcus doesn’t even notice. He’s beyond the trauma the world repeatedly presents him now. These fresh bits of hell are no longer jarring to him. Or you. You want them to be, simply to cling on to some scrap of humanity that means witnessing a charred corpse crammed into a shopping cart would startle you, but…yeah. Not anymore. That feeling is long gone by now.

One demon doesn’t do shit these days. You want despair in this current cultural climate? You gotta crank up the volume. Turn that shit up to eleven, man! And how in the hell do you do that? More demons. More possessions. Thousands of them. Fuck, man…millions.

So…like, how do you give an exorcism to the whole country?

So why hasn’t the government swooped in to save the day? Why aren’t there bombs getting dropped on all of this at this every second? On us? You guessed it: Half—more than half—of the people in charge of the U.S. are possessed, too. This wasn’t just your parents brainwashed by Fax News. This is top brass. This is the president. This is everyone.