Power By Devon Pitlor

Power by Devon Pitlor I. Doing what needed to be done.

Mackenzie Moreland glanced with retching disgust at her severed forearm and which lay in a pool of now drying blood strung across a sheaf of ruined papers which were to be her apology to the world. She had applied her own tourniquet to the rest of her arm using some strong brown twine and baling wire found behind the cabin, and the bleeding had stopped. Her stump was, however, beginning to emit a rather sharp odor, and Mackenzie knew she had to act fast. The beast would attack again, and with its razor sharp claws and crushing mandibles could lop off any part of her body that was exposed. A mere scrape by its probing antennae was like the skin-ripping lash of barbed wire. Her only weapon was a broom handle which she had managed to sharpen into a spear before the last attack. She had neither a telephone nor a gun at her cabin retreat---only her laptop and printer and her overwrought brain boiling with the massive apologies that she needed to write as a public catharsis for her profound remorse and bottomless embarrassment. The insect, now large as a big puppy, could move at an alarming rate of speed. Its armored exoskeleton deflected most of the jabs Mackenzie had issued upon

the first attack, but her spear had found a crevasse in the huge bug's thorax and inflicted a wound which temporarily caused it to retreat into a crack in the wall. It was getting larger by the minute but also had been draining a kind of creamy bluish ichor, which Mackenzie thought to be its blood. It was, she knew, an ordinary cockroach grown to ghastly proportions because of ... because of... Well, she didn't exactly know. Mackenzie had lost a lot of blood on the first attack and wasn't thinking clearly. Her mind had been totally frazzled before dodging the press and escaping to her retreat in the first place. Her doctor had prescribed a strong tranquilizer, big pills, and after the first night Mackenzie spent in hiding, she was sure that she had seen one of the large two inch long cockroaches munching on some tablets spilled inadvertently from the open bottle. Perhaps the trank, Clonazepam, had caused the insect to grow. Perhaps not. Mackenzie, her arm numb with pain, knew she was fighting now for her life. Before the roach, it had been a desperate struggle for her political life. Now it was her very life itself. She needed medical help urgently, but to even venture beyond the cabin and work her way down the hillside to the dirt road, she would have to get past the cockroach, something the huge bug did not want her to do. With iridescent compound eyes rolling around in its huge head sockets, the thing watched her every move. It was bleeding, as she had been, so the scales had been perhaps set even, but each time it crawled out from the wall crevasse, it appeared to be bleeding less.

Mackenzie gripped her sharpened broom handle, crouched behind an overturned table and waited. From somewhere deep within her, a strong survival instinct had emerged. The instinct had surprised her at first, but now she clung to it as her only hope. The dry, armored carapace of the huge roach scraped across the floor, gathering the strength to lunge at her again. Clotted with her own dry blood, Mackenzie waited. She trembled in fear but steadied herself nonetheless. Rest was out of the question, and she was getting delirious. The insect would neither sleep nor retreat. Mackenzie knew these things. It would either chop her apart, or she would manage to gore it again. Woman against insect. Nothing more. Nothing less. II. Mackenzie's cabin retreat. First day. Mackenzie Moreland, governor of West Dakota and principal leader of Americans for Moral Choices, after having made a particularly bad moral choice, had spent a restless night in her family's deserted cabin buried far enough in the foothill woods to escape the prying eyes of the press. She had passed the day wrestling with her laptop and composing a series of broad apologies for her conduct with Daniel Langram, captain of his college's swim team, a twenty-one year old boy who looked particularly buff in his Speedo trunks. Mackenzie had first been attracted to his "outstanding buns" as she called them, and had just wantonly proceeded from that point on. Following her

commencement speech at Daniel's college, Mackenzie, despite her status as state governor, had just spontaneously decided to go forward with whatever was driving her hormones at age 39. She needed a respite from her hectic political agenda, and, besides, the boy was willing. All boys at that age are, Mackenzie knew. She also knew that her affair had offended the Jesus of her youth and the electorate of the state and the membership of Americans for Moral Choices, for which she had campaigned long and hard against adultery in all of its offending forms. But Daniel had just been too alluring. His boyish magnetism had caught the frazzled Mackenzie off guard, and something fresh and vital had arisen within her. But that had all ended last week when the snooping press got word of the ongoing affair. There were pictures, secret pictures, taken with clandestine cell phones and recordings of their email conversations and even tapes of their nefarious meetings, many of which were on state property. Then there had been Justin's reaction. The "first man" of West Dakota, as the press had nicked him. He had managed Mackenzie's successful runs for first the state senate and then the governorship. He had also managed to serve as a house husband and take care of their three children, now ranging in age from 4 to 11--- clean and pretty children, the offspring of a happy and decent couple...or at least until the previous week and its revelations. Then he had openly renounced her. He moved the children out of the governor's mansion and back to Broadside immediately and issued his own press

releases almost hourly about his shock and dismay. In Mackenzie's political peril, her own husband had become her worst enemy. When Mackenzie first disappeared from the state house, aides explained that she was at a sulfur bath retreat and did not wish to be disturbed until Monday when she would issue a full account of her trespasses. Her family's cabin was uncharted by the media and seemed like a good place to compose her apology. She had begun writing: "I face you today, bravely I hope, a changed woman. I am filled with regret and sorrow for the anguish I have caused. I have given pain to those who trusted me, and I now come before you, hiding nothing and asking for your understanding if not your forgiveness." The words seemed hokey and plastic. Mackenzie watched the late afternoon sun fall through the humid atmosphere and took another Clonazepam which she washed down with a mouthful of vodka. The vodka bottle was gradually emptying itself as she wrote on her laptop. It was good to give the Clonazepam something to swim in. A warm sensation of primal innocence washed over her body, erasing some of the tenseness. Another Clonezepam couldn't do any harm. Another glass of vodka. Finally typing became useless. Her concluding sentence made no sense: "I took the boy for what he was, a beautiful symbol of my downfall and my latelife lust, and I would untie it if I could find the knot but now I know I cannot and must not and will not...untie the knot." What was this? Some kind of drunken

poetry? She printed this last revision and threw it on the table in disgust. Another few swigs of vodka and she was asleep on the sofa. She slept fitfully in the light of a kerosene lamp and finally awakened in a stupor to see the room overrun with big roaches. Some were eating the pills she had spilled on the sink. Others were running up and down the walls. It was that way every summer, she remembered. All you needed to do was spray. Fumbling in the utility cabinet, she found the spray and used it. Roaches immediately began flipping over and dying all over the place. Mackenzie still had the presence of mind to not spray over her pills. She noticed that at least two of them had been nibbled down to mere powder, perhaps more. She had not counted the pills beforehand. She put the spilled tablets back in the bottle. Then she slept again. III. The monster cockroach appears. Mackenzie had a huge hangover when the first brazen bars of the morning sun broke into the tiny cabin and illuminated the linoleum floor. Perhaps fifty dead roaches needed to be swept up. As she dumped the dustpan onto the grass in front of the entrance, she heard the scraping and scuffling of something inside the cabin behind her. There on the side of the sink where she had spilled the pills was the largest cockroach she had ever seen. It was about the size of a kitten. Later she would compare it to a large puppy, and finally, as she continued to see it during the morning, it became a

small dog in size. The insect was growing fast. Mackenzie steeled herself and grabbed the can of bug spray. She sat down and waited at the table, flipping through some of the apologetic garbage she had composed the night before. None of it made any sense to her. She grabbed a felt marker and wrote on the bottom of a sheet of paper "I resign." That would be her announcement to the press. That was all they needed. As for Justin, she could look at him through the cameras and just say "I'm sorry." What more was needed? Lots of women desired the company of taut, muscular boys, and Daniel was over eighteen, so there would be no legal repercussions. He was just a little gift she had given herself for all of her hard campaign work. As for her group, Americans for Moral Choices, fuck them and their hypocritical rectitude. Absolute marital fidelity was for the lesser breed. She had always known that. As a girl, growing up tough and strong in the West Dakota woods, she had always forged her own rules and dictated her own laws. How had she allowed herself to become so involved with a bunch of clucking evangelists in the first place? Adults were free to fuck whoever they wanted, and she had wanted the boy. After all, it had been Mackenzie who had first spotted Justin on a football field many years before and decided that he would make the perfect foil for what she then was planning as a cutting edge law firm. He did too. That choice, that conquest had been perfect. Justin had advanced her career. Men, especially handsome and likeable men like Justin, were there to be used. She was

the real star, but she needed some kind of family picture frame...kids...a home...a dog or two. Then politics. Her father had sat in the West Dakota statehouse for twenty years catering to whims of venal wheat farmers and carping Christian "pioneers." Her father knew where the switches of power were turned on and off, and he passed both a good name and the inside secrets of influence to her. She hadn't even bothered to append Justin's last name to her own. Many strong women retained their maiden names after marriage. The Moreland name meant West Dakota. And when she became West Dakota---the youngest governor in the state's history---it went with her cleanly and bereft of any unnecessary hyphen. Hers was a new morality. The morality of the New Age. And Daniel, well, he was trim, smooth and cute. A piece of appealing eye candy. She had given him some experience. She had attached her own aura of potency to his unknown name. Here now was this buff college junior who had slept with the governor, and that would make him passingly famous. The rest would be up to him. With his outstanding looks and trim body, Daniel would go far, and a quick liaison with the state governor was far from a curse. Then the beast appeared again. She heard the crash of a vase full of dead flower stems on the tile floor behind her, turned around and looked into its horrid visage. Inches from her face, it waved its huge antennae. Its six jointed legs, studded with sharp spurs, flagellated before her. A million quivering hairs rose up from its carapace. Its vertical mandibles opened and shut like

mechanical vice clamps. Its vestigial wings quivered. The entire body of the insect was covered with dust, cobwebs and mats of dry debris that it had picked up crawling behind the walls. It may have weighed now close to sixty pounds. It was hard to tell. Its enormous abdomen dragged slowly across the linoleum as it eyed her. She grabbed the empty glass she had filled so often with vodka the previous night and flung it at the vile insect's moving mouthparts. Surprisingly, the thing spun around immediately and scuttled back into a large crack in the cabin wall, a crack which Mackenzie did not even know was there, something her father had neglected to repair, as he only used the place as a hunting cabin. Mackenzie grabbed her laptop and purse from the side of the couch and ran down the crest of the hill to her parked car on the road beneath. She fumbled for her keys and realized with shock that she had left them on the table with the discarded drafts of her now forgotten apology. She would have to return to the cabin. IV. The psychology of power Mackenzie Moreland, governor, lived and breathed power. Her entire staff was continually in awe of her lightning decisions and firm stances on issues that others had only lightly skirted around. She was power, but even power had its limitations. She leaned for a minute against her BMW and looked up the hill toward the cabin. Could she actually go back up there with an

seventy pound roach lurking about? Habitually undaunted, she told herself yes, but her legs remained frozen in place. Then a familiar sense of omnipotence rose up in her. Yes, she would go back up. She could retrieve her keys and handle matters alone. To seek help from someone in the area would only add to her political woes. And then, suddenly without prologue, a man with a shotgun appeared walking down the dirt road. A rustic guy hunting out of season, Mackenzie knew. She could ask him for help. After all, he did have a gun. But Mackenzie knew two other things. First, the man may indeed recognize her as his state governor and as the lascivious adulteress who had garnished the media for the last several days. But secondly and more importantly, if she asked for help, it would invalidate the confidence she held in her own superiority. She was no weakling---her political career proved that. She had grown up on a farm close to these woods. She did not need anyone to assist her with a big bug. There was a hatchet in the cabin too, she remembered. And a long handled broom. She immediately envisioned herself sharpening the broom handle to make a spear--something she later did, but in far more desperation than she imagined standing then by her car. No, she would not ask for help. Superiors rose above the common flock and fended for themselves. Soon she would be back in the capital facing finely barbed questions, and that would be far more challenging than any big cockroach. A higher breed of person needed to

act like a higher breed of person. As towering paragon of strength, she would soon face the vipers of the press and proclaim the ascendancy of her birthright, and it was this strength, and this strength alone, that permitted her to dabble with pretty boys like Daniel. It was this strength that exonerated her from all possible guilt because the strong make their own rules, and one of these rules was that asking an old farmer for help with a bug on a lonely road in the middle of the woods was the very essence of craven weakness. She turned her head away from the road and unfastened her long hair letting it fall over her temples and sides of her face. She had never appeared that way in public, so the man probably would not recognize her, and he didn't. He mumbled "Mornin'" and passed right on by. People minded their own business in this part of the state. When the man had shuffled on far enough to vanish from sight, Mackenzie began walking back up the hill. V. The battle begins The cockroach had grown to the size of small dog and was directly in front of the cabin door ripping apart a spotted fawn with its crushing mandibles and labial tensors. Half of the fawn was strewn across the wooden porch as the beast gorged itself on the unfortunate animal's digestive track by tearing out its intestines in one long, sickly white string. Mackenzie froze upon first sight of the carnage and noted that the insect's

claws were as sharp as butcher knives. It knew how to slash with them too and made fast work of the outer skin of the fawn. Mackenzie realized that the bug could move with astonishing speed. All of her life she had killed the same species of large roach in its normal size which was about two inches long. Roaches were fast moving, and Mackenzie realized that she would not be able to outrun it should it decide suddenly to abandon the fawn and come after her. It could climb anything it wanted too, so skirting up a tree was not an option. If only she had borrowed the passer-by's shotgun. From the distance she now stood, she could have made quick work of the beast. But luck would have it that the roach had caught the fawn first, and all of its attention was directed toward the haphazardly disassembled carcass. The stuffing and swallowing of fawn innards was making the insect slower and less abrupt in trolling its multi-lensed eyes in her direction to the point where she felt reasonably sure that the creature was becoming satiated. All of her life she had seen its lesser brethren gorge themselves on stinking piles of offal and then turn over, expose the softer belly parts of their exoskeletons and languidly oscillate their six multijointed legs in the air. Though huge, the anomaly differed very little from his regular kindred in this gorging pattern, and after a few raspy chews of bone and sinew mixed with intestinal mash, it lurched to its side and seemed to fall into a kind of semistupor. That, remembered Mackenzie, had been the best time to step on them, and it would be the best time

to kill this one. Mustering up her family name and her sense of superior physical and political potency, she darted past the monster and into the still unlocked cabin. On the table in front of her were the draft copies of her apology for the party and the press. She snatched only one of them from the pile, the one marked "I resign." A funny thought was coming into her head about her plans regarding that just now, something that welled up from the core of her forceful personality. Her bravery was going unchallenged by the bloated roach, and now a strong sense of even heightened superiority was filling her mind. It was something like "Fuck it. I probably won't resign now." No, indeed there would be no reason to resign. But the cockroach had her trapped in a cabin designed for the colder season and all the windows were still nailed shut. She had made a mental note to un-nail them the day before, but Clonazepam and vodka had forestalled that plan, along with the compulsion to wash clean her adulterous adventure in contrite and abject language designed to appease the press and her statehouse colleagues. For a few minutes, resignation seemed supremely stupid. She was strong enough to battle a cockroach as big as a wooly lamb, so what was a little tryst with a beautiful boy? No, she didn't need to resign her governor's post any more. She had challenged an atomic cockroach and was winning. That was the stuff of champions, and champions didn't resign over trivialities like a few hours of reckless lust with the

sculpted captain of a college swim team. Just as these thoughts were coursing through her mind, she heard the distinct rustle of the bony insect beyond the door. It was waking up. A moment of panic seized her and she slammed the door and wedged it with a wooden chair. Locating her car keys, she thrust them into her jeans' pocket and looked for the hatchet, a kind of family heirloom which had reputedly belonged to her grandfather and with which he had reputedly once killed a drunken Indian. Stories like that had always circulated in Mackenzie's family. They had come from tough pioneer stock and were at the very apex of the superior when it came to taming the empty expanses of the West. With the hatchet she quickly sharpened the oak handle of her grandmother's huge straw broom, another family heirloom. She lopped the broom end off in one blow and, finding a nail and a small shingle board, attached the latter to the bottom of the spear. In her childhood, she had read the adventures of King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon knights holding off the lunging attacks of the Danes simply by standing on the foot of their spears and allowing the Danes to thrust themselves into their outstretched blades. That was how she planned to deal with the insect if it came at her again. Like a brave Saxon knight, she would stand fast and allow the bug to impale itself onto her spear by its own force. A very neat plan and worthy of the potent warrior which she was.

But the drama, spun in the heat of a northern inland summer day, unrolled otherwise. With the table overturned, Mackenzie stood stoically behind it, spear in hand, foot on base, waiting for a strike as soon as the thing would break through the cabin door. But instead it came in from a crevasse where rafter met roof, knocking a few rotten boards aside as it dropped in seemingly weightless insect-style to the linoleum floor, upon which its claws scraped with a deadly malevolence. It edged around to her flank and attacked immediately in an unexpected swipe to her unprotected left side. Swinging its frighteningly jointed front leg like a scimitar, it immediately sliced away her left lower forearm and hand in one shocking thrust. Her hand and lower arm fell to the table and onto the pile of printed sheets with a thud that reached her ear long before the stun of the blow or the resultant pain reached her brain. She stared at her bleeding stump in awe. She gaped at her severed parts now lying near the edge of the table. These parts had once been attached to her, and they would never be again. It took a few seconds to digest this fact. But Mackenzie recovered and darted at the gloating creature with the sharpened broom handle. Her blows, though mighty and forceful, only glanced impudently off the tough chitin of the animal's carapace. Jabbing and jabbing, she found softer parts under the tough shell and gored the beast, pushing the broom handle at least two feet into its shell. The thing writhed and recoiled, spurting liquid from its wound. Some of the caustic ichor splashed up to Mackenzie's face and eyes and burned like acid. But the beast

retreated into a narrow crack in the log wall. Realizing her loss of blood, Mackenzie ran from the cabin door and to the shed, found some heavy baling twine, and using her mouth and right hand, spun a tight tourniquet around the gushing stump. She found some malleable wire used for fencing and reinforced the tourniquet to a point where her dark blood ceased to spurt. Then she poured the entire contents of her last bottle of vodka over the fearsome wound, wincing in inexpressible pain, biting down hard on the shaft of her broom handle spear. As she rounded the cabin to regain the path downward, the insect waited for her about two meters down the path with glaring eyes and grinding mandibles. She had no choice but to go back inside and position herself behind the overturned table, holding her makeshift spear at a forty-five degree angle, "Saxon style," she told herself in a lightheaded daze. The insect scuttled at once to the front of the table and gyrated on its six legs and probed with its huge antennae. One of the latter chanced to whip over Mackenzie's forehead ripping the skin from its path as would a lash of razor wire. More blood. And this time it was in her face and clouding her vision. But, mustering her superiority, she held fast to the spear and crouched behind the table. It would be her or the cockroach, and it damn sure wasn't going to be her. Not this time. Not ever. The bleeding roach moved slower now, but it had a calculating manner. It sidled along the table top and

managed to project one of its six claws around the side. The first feint missed Mackenzie, but another one immediately followed and scraped across the top front of her Adidas running shoe, slicing neatly through the sneaker material and cutting off the top joint of the three lesser toes of her left foot. The toes flew across the room like little pink ingots and landed on the floor behind the insect. More blood gushed. Mackenzie thought there was no time to bind this wound, and she would just have to die from the blood loss. Noticing the family heirloom hatchet on the floor, she momentarily dropped the spear and seized it with her good hand. In a last act of futile desperation, she flung it Indian style directly into the insects writhing mandibles, and it stuck. The hatchet had split the beast's mouth in half and lodged itself into its oral cavity. In vain, the roach attempted to extricate the hatchet from the hole between its ever-grinding mandibles. When it retreated slightly, Mackenzie rushed at it again with the spear and found a soft, fatty part near the underjoint of the armor where its flat abdomen met its thorax and jabbed wildly in a blind frenzy of truly supernatural strength. The insect squirted out blacker blood and clots of wet fat from its torn underside. Backing up, it left a pungent trail of innards and briskets of stored fat on the cabin floor. It eyed her with the sort of mute malevolence that only an insect can inspire and was preparing to catapult itself forward again. It brandished all six of its claws and advanced. But the advance was slowed by its draining carapace and the vital organs which now trailed behind it. Mackenzie,

wracked with pain in both foot and arm, willed herself to take the lead again and came forward with the spear lodging it deeply under the beast's wagging head, cracking through the tough layers of jet into the beast's cranial core. Mackenzie swore in the worst language she knew, foul words, delirious words, words which she had taught her children not to use. Maybe it was these epithets which did it, but the insect stirred no more. It stopped oscillating and quivering and remained immobile and ostensibly very dead. VI. Mackenzie's triumph Dizzy, clotted with blood and stumbling, Mackenzie realized at length that she had destroyed the anomaly. She looked at the crude tourniquet on her arm and then at her still bleeding foot, to which she attached another wooden shingle with baling wire and twine. She chucked her spear into a corner and looked around the cabin. "I won," she announced loudly to no one in particular. "I won." Winning had not surprised her. She had been used to winning before. In ghastly pain and caked with blood and god knows what else, she descended the pathway to her car and found an old family friend, Doctor Adkins, who asked no questions and patched her up as best he could. Adkins sent her under cover to the state hospital in Maltville, and they finished his crude work. When

she emerged several days later, she had a turquoise tube over her left arm and some temporary prosthetic toes. She was driven by someone who didn't speak English to the capital and regained her office sometime in the middle of the night. She told her security personnel to be quiet, and they did. She read reams of newsprint about herself, endless speculations about where she might have been, what she was doing and who she was with. One article opined that she had escaped her shame and gone to South America. Another claimed that she had committed suicide as the "natural" thing to do in her pitiable circumstance. Daniel Langram was interviewed in still another article and claimed that their affair had been purely platonic, which of course it wasn't, but it was a convenient cop-out for the boy. In a glossy photo-op press release, Justin proclaimed to the whole world that he would never countenance his wife again and that he and the boys were going into reclusion for a time "to regain our sanity." The state Republican Party leader was quoted as saying that Mackenzie would surely resign given the hurt and shame she had caused. The wolf pack press augmented this sentiment and called for her head on a platter. Americans for Moral Choices disavowed any connection with the governor. "She was just a mouthpiece," admitted one of their number. "We still stand for what is right and decent. We can do without an unabashed and unrepentant sinner." The lieutenant governor, Mr. Cal Owensby, was apparently preparing to take over the state leadership within hours. Citizen protest abounded. Mackenzie Moreland, scion of a long

political tradition in West Dakota, was not longer qualified to.....and so on. VII. Conclusion On August 12th, Mackenzie Moreland, governor of West Dakota, emerged before a restless and milling pack of press conference attendees. Her news, what they had of it, had been spread across the world. Her resignation was at hand. That had already been prognosticated by the media, by Americans for Moral Choice and by the Republican Party. All that mattered now was how she framed it. Justin did not stand by her side, nor were any of her children there. Late summer rain fell in sheets, and a sea of umbrellas blossomed before the state podium. Some earlier supporters carried handwritten signs reading "Betrayal." Others had banners, dampened by the rain, that read "Hypocrite" and "Adulteress." Mackenzie walked out waving her left arm stump encased in its bright turquoise tube. Her left foot was wrapped in a white plaster cast signed by no one. A hush fell over the crowd. The youngest governor in the state's history was about to resign in shame, and that would be world news. The commentaries had already begun. Cal Owensby sat nervously in a folding chair under two umbrellas held by aides, patiently waiting his turn to take the reigns of office.

"I was attacked last week by a cougar," Mackenzie began with a steely-eyed confidence that galvanized the attention of the crowd. "The cougar lost and I won." She cleared her throat and said that Reform Bill 780B was the most sweeping piece of legislation that she had ever proposed and that next week she would be going on tour statewide to promote it. "I also am putting rapid cross-state rail service on my agenda as a priority," she said. The rain paused, and a confused murmur rippled across the crowd. Many eyed one another in wonder; others gaped in shock. Mackenzie continued on about high speed rail until an eager reporter for the West Dakota Times interrupted her by asking about her extra-marital affair with Daniel, her disappearance, and her subsequent plans to leave politics. Mackenzie became pensive for a moment and said "I was mauled by a cougar last week. That doesn't mean much to anyone but me, but I have no plans for resignation, nor should I, and as for my dalliance with the boy, well, who doesn't do that from time to time? I hope Justin forgives me because I have long ago forgiven myself. We have a lot of stress in these jobs. But we persevere. What more can I add?" Her final words to the press corps were "That is all."

And in the end, she was deemed the strongest governor the state had ever known and, not at all miraculously, she was handily reelected for a second and then a third term. She never failed to discharge all of her duties with unparalleled vigor. ___________________________ Devon Pitlor

June, 2009