Yawn

“Dad, did you hear? Ms. Gab Gab cut them both off!”

Liam Summers did a thing he thought only happened in movies: he stopped in his tracks, hand with a joint halfway to his mouth, guitar balanced precariously on one thigh. He even blinked multiple times, the human brain’s version of the buffering circle, to give his mind time to process this. “She did what now?”

Pedro, his son, glided smoothly into the seat across from him. Pedro still glided despite having been a boy for the past three years. He couldn’t help himself. Scion of Liam and his third wife, Pedro had been a drop-dead gorgeous woman before deciding to embrace his true gender identity. He had, of course, cut them both off too, but Pedro, while a talented musician in his own right, was not a pop singer who traded on his sexuality for attention.

Though mid-November, it was still warm and sunny on Liam’s patio, endless summer, a perk of living in Malibu. The fruits of hard work and toil. Laboring for the masses. What was Liam but a humble chronicler of humble origins, telling the working man’s story again and again?

This time, he had difficulty channeling the working man’s rage into music, because this time was different. This time the working man had betrayed him. All the concerts, all the speeches, all the late-night talk show jaw-flapping, and Joe Sixpack went and pulled the lever for the fascist who hates him.

Serves him right, Liam would think, but he’d catch himself before going down that dark path. It wasn’t Joe Sixpack's fault. They just did a piss-poor job of getting their message out. Another song would do it. But it had to be a, what did they call them now? A bop. A banger.

“She cut them both off,” Pedro repeated. He made a line right across his breastbone for emphasis. “In protest. If men are going to vote to take away her rights, she’s going to take away what men like.

“Wow, that’s . . . uh, brave.” The joint had found its way back to Liam’s mouth now. “So she, what, didn’t do it on camera yeah?”

Pedro nodded vigorously.

“That’s, I mean, that’s kind of . . .” Liam wanted to say sick, but from the gleam in Pedro’s eyes, he knew he’d better not. “. . . intense.”

“What’re you gonna do, dad?”

Liam expelled a thin stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “I’m, you know, doing what I always do.” He hefted his guitar.

Pedro vigorously shook his head. “That’s not good enough, dad. We don’t need songs. We need action.

“What are you gonna do — what’re we gonna do—to show we resist this oppressive regime?”

Liam strummed a desultory chord, a forlorn Amin9, and set his guitar aside. “Can I see it?”

Pedro tapped his phone a few times and handed it over. There was Ms. Gab Gab, all peroxide blonde and red lips and big bosom, now on an operating table about to be put under. From his own small surgeries, Liam knew the medicine pumping into her system via the IV stuck in her arm would soon send her off to dreamland, but with her final few moments, someone, presumably an assistant allowed into the operating room, filmed her drawling manifesto:

“Last Tuesday, American men chose to enslave me, to treat me with zero respect, to turn me into nothing more than an object for their grafitication”— she was clearly feeling the effects of the anesthesia—“but it's something I’ll pray along with —play along with, no more. We’re done being second-class citizens in a fascist regime. If men like to get grafitication looking at my body, let them look at this. Look at what you’re doing to women . . . to all women . . .”

Here, an anesthesiologist put a mask on her face and told her to take deep breaths. The video went on.

Liam drew the line when the surgeon did, right under her breasts where the incisions would be made. He’d always been kind of squeamish about blood and when that doctor—a woman, naturally—picked up the scalpel, he made to hand the phone back. But then a comment caught his eye.

“Do it you fucking cunt.”

What the hell?

Another: “Nobody cares. Attention whore.”

More:

“Best thing you’ve ever put out, retard.”

“Take your tongue out too.”

“Good luck selling records without the only things people care about you.”

And so on. Endless comments insulting Ms. Gab Gab, expressing joy at her double mastectomy. For every comment in support of Ms. Gab Gab there were probably one hundred disparaging her.

Bewildered, Liam handed the phone back to his son. That’s not how it was supposed to go. The American people were with them, not against them. “Trolls,” he said. “Lots of trolls on the Internet.”

Pedro kept scrolling while he talked to Liam. “Ever since that idiot bought X, it’s been nothing but Nazis on the Internet. It’s gonna get worse. Unless we do something.”

“I did all I could, kiddo.” Liam took another drag and handed the joint to Pedro, puff puff pass for the whole family, who took it gladly. “I wrote songs, I played benefits, I did the talk show circuit . . .” He shrugged. The THC wasn’t relaxing him as much as he'd hoped. “It worked before.”

“This is different,” said Pedro. “Different times, dad. What used to work doesn’t anymore. You know, it has to be, like, drastic.”

“The women shaving their heads,” Liam offered.

“The 4b movement,” Pedro finished. “A part of me kind of wishes I could, you know, do that too.”

You kind of are, Liam thought, and immediately felt guilty. Sometimes he looked at Pedro and missed his Cassandra. But he had other daughters to dote on. He quickly put it out of mind. “Is this working?” he asked. “Are minds changing?”

He respected Pedro’s opinion. Pedro was Gen Z. He was terminally online. He had the pulse of his generation. Never steered Liam wrong before. Go on this podcast. Play this festival. Support this politician or policy. Pedro helped Liam extend his career more than any agent or lawyer or A&R nerd. No reason not to trust him on this as well.

“It's too early to tell,” said Pedro, “like, conclusively, but I know people are listening. People are playing attention.”

“So those comments?”

“Loser incels in their basements.” Pedro made a jacking-off gesture. “They'll be dead soon anyway. It’s the good ones we need to wake up. I mean, look at this.”

More videos, each weirder than the last. Here, Academy Award winner Carolyn Bennett swearing off acting until the President-elect steps down. There, rock singer Johnny Blanco dropping his lawsuit against the bastard but vowing to only record atonal feedback until they can overturn the election (without ever mentioning how). Oh look, comedian Parker Chang will be canceling her top-rated Apple TV show and going on a political speaking tour where she vows to tell no jokes until the dictator’s term is over because, quote, “there, nothing left to laugh about.” Fellow aging rocker Leo backpedaling on his vow to throw himself into the ocean with a millstone around his neck if the evil one won as the commentariat urged him to stop being a pussy and live up to his words. Wild times.

“I dunno, kiddo,” said Liam, the joint long burned out. “It seems kid of extreme. And the comments . . .”

Pedro, head on Liam’s shoulder like when he was Cassandra, shook his head. “Forget the comments, dad. This is making a difference. This is what we have to do.”

“We?”

“To show we’re down with the struggle, you know? We’re not part of the patriarchy.”

“Never.” Liam straightened up. “Never been. I’m an original feminist, kiddo. I’ve been pro-choice from day one. I was pro-choice before it was called pro-choice.”

“Anti-Christian.”

Liam shook his head and looked out wistfully at the beach, visible through the lush vegetation growing on the cliffside behind his house. “No. Absolutely not.”

“But they’re fascists, dad.”

“They buy records too, kiddo.”

“Dad—”

“No listen. I don’t like to be anti-anything. I’m pro-things. Pro-choice, pro-women, pro-workers, pro-trans, pro-civil rights.”

“But they're pro-fascist.”

“Not all of them. What people do in the privacy of their church isn’t my business.”

“It is.” Pedro was heated now. He stood, fists clenched, shaking, on the verge of tears behind those big round-lensed glasses. “It’s all your business because they want to ruin my life!” Voice on the verge of hysteria now. “They want to control me as a woman!”

Liam’s mouth went dry. “Pedro, kid, listen—”

“I’m not fucking Pedro. Fuck this, I’m a woman. They want to control me and force me to breed, and I'm not gonna stand for it! If you’re too much of a coward—”

Pedro—Cassandra’s phone dinged. She looked at the screen and thrust it in Liam’s face. “Look, look! You thought Ms. Gab Gab was brave? Look at Carmelita Cabrera! She had her fucking clit removed. Look!”

God help him, Liam looked. There was twenty-five-year-old pop starlet sensation Carmelita Cabrera undergoing a clitoridectomy to defeat the patriarchy. “That’s bravery!” Cassandra screamed. “That’s courage. That’s how you fight back and win. What are you gonna do about it?”

Liam gestured to his guitar. “My songs . . .”

“No one gives a fuck about your songs!” She was crying, sobbing, snot running down her nose and onto her upper lip. It almost made Liam want to puke. “What are you gonna do about it? You’re too comfortable because you’re part of the patriarchy too!”

“Whoa, wait a minute.” Liam stood, but what was he going to do, really?

“You voted for him, didn’t you! Fuck you, dad. Fuck you!” Cassandra turned and ran back into the house.

“Of course I didn’t—Pedro!”

“It’s Cassandra, you fucking white male!”

She stormed off, and all Liam could hear once again was the chirping of birds and the crashing of waves.

---

So what was he going to do? What stand was he prepared to take? When all the women were braver than the men, someone had to lead by example. Someone like the voice of the working man . . . and woman.

His peers were denying their art to America for making the wrong choice. That was the only principled stand to take, the only gesture that was more than symbolic. The American people weren’t worthy of the culture people like Liam gave to them so freely. They would have to pay. Liam knew what he had to do.

He was ready.

His phone was propped up on the garden table. He was streaming. His handheld, cordless, electric cutoff tool was at the ready. And he was drunk and high enough to feel little to no pain, which gave him a residual pain of cowardice, but fuck it, it’s not like Carmelita Cabrera was conscious during her procedure. At least Liam was awake.

He cleared his throat. “Hey everyone, this is Liam. I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching, you know, searching around in my soul. Trying to find a song to write to express how I'm feeling in these dark times.

“Dark days, you know? And nothing’s coming up. Nothing musical. It’s too dark. There’s no chord ugly enough to express how I’m feeling now, how we’re all feeling. We gotta find another way to express ourselves or we’ll go crazy.

“If you’re with me, you know what I mean. You let us down, America. America let us down. Let our daughters and mothers and girlfriends down. Disappointed them. Men . . . men, really, what the fuck?

“What the fuck were you thinking? Why do you hate women so much? Hate blacks? Why? I love women, blacks . . . love them so, so much . . .”

He started crying, stopped, carried on.

“You don't deserve us, America. Until you make the right choice, you deserve the dark, demented, stale pale and male culture you’re gonna get. Fuckin’ Walmart trash culture.” He looked up, caught Cassandra, now with her head shaved, leaning against the door smiling at him. He smiled too, emboldened, inspired.

He nodded at her. She nodded back.

“And so this.” He engaged the cutoff tool for a second, the blade whirring with an ear-tingling whine. “This is the price you pay. Look what you're making me do, America. Look what you're making me do! Until our daughters and mothers and girlfriends are free, you’ll get nothing. You hear that, Nazis? Nothing!”

He placed his left hand on the table, his fretting hand, fingers splayed out. Do or die time. Do or die. He had his doctor on standby so he knew he would be fine. He wouldn't bleed out or get infected. They could even reattach—

No. This had to be permanent. This had to be for real. Or it was nothing.

Cutoff tool on now. Bring it down. Just do it quickly. “For America!” he yelled and brought the tool against his pinky finger, as close to the knuckle as he could get.

He screamed, blood flew, bone broke, and the tool flung his severed finger back a few inches. There wasn’t quite as much blood as he expected looking at that appendage, like a small snake or a penis, lying impotently on the now damaged aluminum table. A strange sense of dissociation came over him, like he was someone else observing seventy-year-old Liam Summers, rock n’ roll legend of the working man, cutting off his own finger like some kind of insane person. But he had to do it. For the future.

“Huhhh . . . hurgh!” He fought the urge to vomit and kept his gorge down. “That’s . . . that’s what you get, America. That’s what you get!”

Cassandra was crying, wiping away tears of joy. “So proud,” she mouthed, and for a moment Liam believed he was making a difference. Surely America would see the error of its ways and repent, repent . . .

. . . until he looked at the comments.

“Wow a pinky. So stunning. Much brave. Fucking pathetic.”

“Loser. Take your whole hand off and save us any more shitty boomer music.”

“I call this a good start.”

“Congratulations, Liam. You did what an entire legion of anons couldn’t: chase you out of the music biz.”

But the one that hurt the most, the true dagger through his bleeding heart, was a single word typed by a person calling themselves “Coochiemullet1999”:

“Yawn."”

- Alexander

---

Thank you for reading this short story. If you would like to read more of my fiction, please check out my books on Amazon. You can also throw a few coins into the tip jar at Buy Me A Coffee. Thank you, and God bless.