Dispatch 1 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction

In this character-driven absurd bureaucratic romp mystery set in an alternative, popcorn and pepper obsessed world in which the North won the first Civil War but fragmentation triumphed and the United States of Disunion was born, we follow an intrepid journalist and a loyal inventor as they uncover part of the truth about the potential murder of the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s three top leaders.  With the exception of accurate historical references, any relation to actual persons or news is purely accidental and illustrates that old saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

The Scene

Down the Little View Road, just outside Little View, Kentucky, an emergency crew poked at the wreckage at the scene of the crash. Popcorn. The charred bodies had been removed. As they moved about the scene, they crunched occasional popped corn kernels underfoot.  

The first victim 

Just a few hours earlier, Klair Plunkett  had dragged himself out of bed to face yet another day as  the Honorable Secretary of Gaming for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. If you had told him before the take-over that he would hate his new job, he would have laughed in your face and felt distinctly superior. He would have thought you were jealous of him for landing on the right side of a coup. He would have told you that he deserved his happiness. Regular people--even some mayors--thought it was glamorous, being in Cass’s crew. Thought he had all the power and had it easy. But it had taken him years of hard work-- drudge work. In other words, flattery. Now he was poised for prominence and success at last. People would have to flatter him for a change. 

That should be starting at home, he felt, but his wife had made it clear that, fond of him though she was, she was still not impressed by him, coup or no coup. She wasn’t picking up his dirty laundry or hopping out of bed in the morning to fix him breakfast as his grandmother had done for his grandfather. Those were the good old days, whatever anyone said, he thought wistfully. Of course, as his wife was only too happy to point out, his grandfather had spent his days out in the fields and needed a big breakfast. A small bowl of grits was really enough for a politician, especially one who was only in charge of games. He was lucky that his wife left him to fix his own breakfast, he thought ruefully. If she had done it, the serving would doubtless have been smaller, not to mention salted and buttered less liberally. 

Nothing was working out as well as he had hoped. His wife seemed not to notice that he was now important. The media called him one of the Tres Amigos, which was something, but on his gloomier days, he was disappointed to be merely one of three, and the other two weren’t his friends. They were fools.

Brinkman, The Secretary of Energy, seemed to have no plans.  the Secretary of Alcohol and Tobacco, was obsessed with minutiae regarding bourbon and had no vision. With people like that in charge, no wonder nothing ever improved. As Secretary of Gaming, Plunkett had ideas and plans for implementation. He would modernize the Commonwealth’s approach to gaming, work to allow Commonwealthers to play again. Throughout the Commonwealth, not just at Bubbleland. The hypocrisy of the rules that deemed Bubbleland exempt from the usual prohibitions simply because it was surrounded on three sides by the Ohio River and on the third side by  Tennessee was absurd. The mayor of Bubbleland benefited tremendously from this arrangement, but Plunkett felt sure that he would find powerful allies in the mayors from other areas of the commonwealth. Plunkett would straighten things out.