In Which the Magpie Delivers the (Fake) News from the Meeting of the Electoral College

An island receives an unexpected party . . . a prize is granted . . . a large problem is solved.

Magpie, definition, Cambridge Dictionary: 1) a bird with black and white feathers and a long tail, 2) someone who likes to collect many different objects, or use many different styles

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On December 19, 2016, the Electoral College of the United States met and changed their votes to someone better. The numerologists were not surprised, because 12 + 19 + 2016 = 2047, and 2 + 0 + 4 + 7 = 13, and 1 + 3 = 4, and 4, in numerology, is the number of stability, practicality, pragmatism, trust, and honest work. It is Denzel Washington in Malcolm X (the second half) rather than Denzel Washington in Flight (the first half). It is Aunt Bee. It is the ant, not the grasshopper. It is your mother getting up early, heating up her coffee in the microwave, and going to work every day, every week, every month, every year to a job that seems to you very boring compared to the drama of your own world-historic life to which all the novels and all the songs and all the plays are speaking directly and with great meaning.

Once the votes were changed to someone better, a big wind came up and blew that whole other family and the cabinet-that-never-was to a rocky island somewhere far away where they had to learn to survive by their wits and their physical abilities. The island situation was not televised. They calmed right down and no one ever thought about them again. But when that wind came up, everyone else said, “You know, we’re having a lot of big winds these days, and the climate thing is a very big, complex, practical problem—and a fascinating problem, to boot—that maybe we can solve together.” So smart people from everywhere worked incredibly hard and while they didn’t reverse it, they slowed it down to just manageable proportions. For this, the world itself received the Nobel Peace Prize of 2025 and everyone showed up for the ceremony.

Because everyone was working together for such long hours, and eating together, and hauling heavy machinery together across deserts and over mountains and through stormy seas (it’s complicated), and staring at numbers that didn’t add up, and, of course, falling in love and falling out of love and getting into arguments about whose turn it was to take the compost out, they couldn’t get lost in fantasies about one another. It was just too sweaty, too ordinary, and too real. Smelling one another’s shit, and their own, in the mobile office trucks with the bad fluorescent lighting made that whole otherness/dehumanizing idea seem quaint, like phrenology. They hated one another sometimes, sure, but in the way you hate your siblings sometimes, annoyingly aware that you share DNA forever and always have. Astronomy became a popular pastime, in part because it suggested that, if our vantage points and the stars were reversed, we might see ourselves from way out in space not being assholes. We liked that, because we were tired at the end of the day and we weren’t sure if we had gotten anything right. We remembered that our mothers were tired at the end of the day, too, and often fell asleep on the sofa watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Because we had come so close to losing an alive planet, thus our own lives and the lives of our children and their children and so on, also because we had all gotten the Nobel Peace Prize and everyone likes to get a big prize, the grotesquely wealthy people stopped rigging the system so that they could grab all the money in the world. They kept enough money so that they could feel superior and have all the good stuff they wanted, but the culture of financial cruelty ebbed in popularity. This happened slowly, but it happened. As with hatred, local greediness still bubbled up—grabbing the last piece of cake, dicking another driver out of a parking space, lying about a colleague to get a thimble’s worth of power in the department which turns out to be no power at all, again—but systemic, ruinous, global financial battering went back to being a rare occurrence of madness rather than the norm.

Many folks speculated about this trend, made use of big data and ancient prophecies and things like that, but it was entirely clear to Wendy, a transgender high school social studies teacher in Saskatchewan, that the culture shifted because of a new acceptance of the reality of death. She blogged about it, but there were so many blogs that no one really paid much attention. Nevertheless, I will quote her here. She wrote, “I put my hand in the little stream today. It was the first day that the stream wasn’t completely iced over, but it was still so incredibly cold, cold as iron. My dog Pan jumped and barked at the air. Today was the fifteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. So ironic, or something, that she died on the day of the Great Global Nobel Peace Prize, because that’s why it all went down that way, right? When we finally remembered that we were all mortal, and that our species would die of our delusions of absolute power, that money wasn’t alive, we got to work. My mother would have appreciated that. She was a steady worker and now, to my own surprise, so am I. Also, I think Pan might be pregnant.”

Because the Electoral College met on December 19, 2016 and changed their votes to someone better, I called you and said, “I’m sorry.” And you said, “That’s so funny, I was just about to call you and say the same thing.” And I said, “Do you want to have lunch?” And you said, “Yes. I would like that.”

And I looked out the window at the people passing on the street, breathing a sigh of relief. For the first time in weeks, I didn’t have that refrain running through my mind of all the things I needed to do and all the things that frightened me and all the things that made me so angry. For the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel as if I were living in a dark, absurdist irreality. So I stretched, had a snack, called my mom, and got back to work.