This is the eighth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. Read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.
That spring the premier implemented a series of daring protocols. He was a thin man, sharp dresser. After lunch you’d see him leaving a certain outdoor café erratically, in a party spirit, knocking back the last drops from an elongated champagne flute he’d leave on the low wall by the lane for the waiter to scurry over and collect.
With him would go three hulking curved backs, and sometimes a shaved head on a thick neck would turn, accusing any diners whose eyes still followed the premier. About these thick-necks hung a suggestion of guns concealed beneath expensive jackets worn casually, as if they’d been born thick-necked babies and issued tiny expensive Italian shoes and immediately started chewing gum and being suspicious of the other babies in the nursery while waiting for the premier to come and find them so that the truly useful part of their lives could begin.
The premier’s ethos had left its mark even on the river, which ran now through a changed city where the warmth formerly felt among the people seemed a quaint relic of some earlier, lethargic era during which little brusque progress had been made. Occasionally, the river would cough up a body, having first imbued it with a reptilian cast that made the person the reptile used to be seem retrospectively guilty.
A person wanted to stay clear of it, all of it. Sons were swept into the militia or trucked to a rumored labor camp out beyond the slaughterhouse. Daughters, too, were vanishing—seen slithering into cars, ruined, addicted, smirking.
Distinction of any kind could land one (one’s child, one’s spouse, even one’s horse—a horse was taken for the sins of its owner) in the river. The thing to do was develop an interest in the flower boxes on one’s balcony or keep a record of the stars one saw at night and lose oneself entirely in such things.
Then it was fall and a red car burst into the café, throwing tables around. It seemed to want the premier and it left as soon as it had got him, bucking a few unlucky diners off its back. The thick-necks were now melded into one entity, a woven placemat improbably atop it. The premier was just a slim dead thing holding a fork, still impeccably dressed.
The driver sped away, carrying the burden, we supposed, of the way the screaming and crunching had felt to him. He must be forever changed, we thought, entire fields of joy no longer his, every lovely thing tainted. But who could say? Maybe he walked around feeling like a hero. We had no idea. He and his red car had just vanished into the afternoon dust.
Within days a man came forward to take credit for killing the premier. This was news to the man who’d actually done it. Bottles of wine began appearing in front of the false killer’s apartment door, and his stairway became difficult to navigate for all the bouquets. Regarding the impostor, the real killer tried to be at peace. Which was difficult, given all the glory the false killer was getting. The real killer started having panic attacks and a recurring nightmare in which one of the unlucky diners, a young woman, smiled at him with welcoming curiosity, as she had on the day, as if, instead of killing her, he were bringing a surprise dessert to her table.
Then came a strange twist in our national saga.
The false killer, rescuer of the republic, was assassinated by a cowardly group of reactionaries loyal to the former premier, who detonated a bomb just as the great national hero stepped out one morning to collect his wine and flowers.
The new premier quickly announced that the reactionaries were to be hanged without a trial in the public square. The former premier had always had his enemies killed behind closed doors, brutally, for the terror of it, with crowbars and mallets, requiring these occasions to be filmed. A rushed public hanging therefore seemed almost moderate by comparison.
But a week before the execution, there came a confused, confusing announcement: the false killer was not, as it turned out, dead after all, just badly wounded, “likely to recover,” both legs and part of one arm blown off.
The main newspaper, emboldened by the relative liberality of the new regime, intoned jocularly that a person was either dead or not. Correct? One did not “recover” from death, did one? Yes, “quite a recovery,” hectored the next largest paper, trying to get in on the fun. Who had decided to lie to the people? And why? Had we not had enough of this obscurantist nonsense?
The false killer now became, to the chagrin of the real killer, an even greater national hero. Photos of him being cared for by his beautiful but not too beautiful fiancée began to appear in the newspapers, which had the effect of causing the people to feel that merely hanging the reactionaries was somehow not enough.
On Christmas Eve, a mob stormed the jail, and the jailers (some of them, enough of them) stepped aside, and the reactionaries were dragged off to the abandoned sports stadium, where things worse than hanging were done to them, and then their mutilated corpses were burned in a pit, into which the men who had mutilated the corpses took turns jovially urinating, an act many of them, including my brother, would come to regret.
Because over the next week a troubling rumor was confirmed by the main newspaper: the reactionaries who’d planted the bomb that had maimed the false killer had not been reactionaries after all but a group of grieving, justice-seeking relatives of the unlucky diners.
Certain overzealous supporters of the new premier had (apparently, regrettably) used various forms of mild physical persuasion to elicit false confessions from the loved ones of the unlucky diners, confessions that would serve, once obtained, they felt, to confirm the new premier’s position that, in order for him to continue his important work of restoring order, all must remain vigilant to the possibility that reactionary elements loyal to the former premier not only still existed but were actively plotting a devious return to power.
The newspapers embarked on a period of hand-wringing regarding the new premier’s adoption of his predecessor’s oppressive habits, a hand-wringing that ceased only when the offices of the three leading newspapers were simultaneously firebombed.
The editors of these papers bravely continued, in hastily printed broadsheets, to claim that violence only begat further violence and that the nation was in an inexplicable downward spiral, the only way out of which was a return to love and fellow-feeling. Then the bodies of these editors were found floating in the river, beheaded, and the bodies of the fathers of these editors were discovered in the main square, a copy of each son’s paper’s masthead heavy-stapled into the applicable torso.
We all experienced a palpable increase in our fear of, and respect for, the new premier and hastily reverted to our previous flinching, cautious way of living.
Every Saturday now he held court in the café in which the old premier had died, to demonstrate how utterly unafraid he was. He even took questions, though his guards (he had nine) might sometimes jokingly point a machine gun at a citizen whose question seemed insufficiently patriotic.
One Saturday morning, the man who had actually killed the former premier went to his dead uncle’s garage, where he’d hidden the red car, started it up, then sat behind the wheel, thinking. Once already, in the name of goodness, he’d sullied himself with murder. Shouldn’t he at least try to kill this new, even more evil, premier? Otherwise, what had it all been about?
Killing the new premier would entail killing another set of unlucky diners. For him: more panic attacks, fresh nightmares. This time, if he succeeded, he would at least take some credit. Good God, yes, he would: no more silent suffering in anonymity. Afterward, he would climb up on the hood of his red car and, addressing the people, propose a new movement that would eschew violence and rule by justice and gentleness forever. Also firmness, of course. A merciful firmness the people would instantly respect.
Or he could forget the whole thing, go back to being the man he’d been before the first killing: a frightened, passive nobody.
This thought made him sicker than the thought of another round of screaming and crunching.
He leaped out of the still running red car, threw the garage door open, and, feeling alive and decisive, stood blinking in the morning sunlight, readying himself for his task. ♦
