“Did you see us?” called a mysterious and haunting chorus behind me while I was walking down the street. I was puzzled because the street was just empty, so I assumed perhaps I was either daydreaming or just misheard an arbitrarily articulate dray of squirrels.
“Tell us you saw us,” they repeated.
I turned, cautiously, as if expecting a ghost. Or worse, a pollster. Instead, to my dismay, it was 17 white women, fused together into one latte-clutching phantasm. The horror.
“We weren’t sure if you saw us. We had to be sure,” they chorused, as I backed away from them and into the street. A police car zoomed past and almost hit me. The UGG-booted fiend winked at the cop in the passenger seat, and then, immediately, the car began to levitate and twirl and kept rising and rising and rising and rising until it vanished into the atmosphere.
It laughed.
“We forget sometimes how powerful we are. All it takes is a wink to conjure and disappear police. It’s like they’re our imaginary friend—like ‘Bing Bong’ in Inside Out—except they’ll, you know, kill you if we ask.”
After collecting myself, I was finally able to speak.
“So, what is your name? What do I call you?”
The sound that emerged next—part staccato, part vocal fry, part echo, part Hell-speak, part AppleCare—haunts me to this day.
“We’reKARENKaRenkarenKAREnkarenKArenKARENKaRenkarenKAREnkarenKARENKaRenkarenKAREnkarenKArenKARENKaRenkarenKAREnkarenKArenKARENKaRenkarenKAREnkarenKAren.”
As my nose began to bleed, I needed to know more. Where were they from? What was their purpose?
“We emerge every four years to walk the Earth and share our mission. We don’t proselytize as much as we just, you know, exist.”
“What is this mission?”
“Just to remind everyone that we’re white.”
This confused me.
“I mean, your mission is your mission, or whatever. I won’t mission-shame. But why do you need to remind us that you’re white when anyone can just see it? There’s literally no doubt of your whiteness. You smell like cucumber kombucha, for chrissakes.”
“Haha,” they snort-laughed. “You’d think that’d be the case, right? We’re white as fuck. Whiter than the crack Aaron Sorkin used to smoke.”
“Aaron Sorkin smoked crack?”
“The Mt. Rushmore of crackheads is just four selfies of Aaron Sorkin. But yeah, people somehow forget. Which is so perplexing, because we’ve always been white and will always be white. So we just like to pop up and say ‘Hey, everyone. Guess what? We’re white.’”
“Fascinating.”
“Well, it was great to meet you, but we have to be on our way.”
“Where are you going next?”
“We don’t know. We never know. We just show up places, and then we just stay there until it’s time to be somewhere else. So we guess it’s like we’re always everywhere.”
They winked again, vaporized themselves into some sort of amalgamation of a fog and Watermelon Glow Ultra-Fine Mist, and disappeared into the aether.
The moment they left, the levitated police car dropped from the sky.
“Can I help you?” the cop asked before his head exploded.
“No,” I shot back, at the headless corpse, before I went back into the house.
I hate Election Day.
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