@emilyseatingtacos

Monday, September 21, 2026

Breakfast

Sno’ Witty™ did not wake up wanting to participate in democracy.

She woke up wanting a dry bagel and twenty minutes of silence before the sun hit the siding.

She received neither.

At 7:14 a.m., she opened the front door to check the morning dampness and stepped directly onto an oversized postcard featuring a high-gloss photograph of a man named Brad standing in an unharvested soybean field.

Brad looked very stern.

According to the bold font across his sternum, Brad was the only barrier preventing the county drainage board from ushering in global communism.

Sno’ Witty™ ate two cold pizza rolls that had ruptured in the toaster oven the previous evening and solidified on a paper towel.

She chewed the cold dough and studied Brad.

Brad was wearing a pristine denim button-down that had clearly never encountered diesel exhaust. The crease down the sleeve could have trimmed hedges.

Brad wanted her vote.

Sno’ Witty™ does not even want her own attention at seven in the morning, let alone Brad’s fiscal platform.

She dropped Brad into the blue recycling bin.

He slid in next to four other Brads and an urgent warning about local culvert funding.

Lunch

Lunch was a tablespoon of peanut butter scraped off a butter knife and dipped into crushed saltines, eaten standing over the sink so no dishes were introduced into the economy.

Her phone vibrated against the laminate counter.

It was an automated short code.

PATRIOT ALERT, EMILY: Radical forces are within 1.8% in your precinct. If you don't chip in $5 before midnight, who will defend the township?

Sno’ Witty™ stared at the screen.

First of all, texting in all-caps on a Monday afternoon is hostage behavior.

Second of all, if Western civilization is currently balancing on whether Sno’ Witty™ wires five dollars to a server rack in Delaware, Western civilization had a good run and should probably conclude its affairs.

She typed: STOP

The short code immediately replied:

We understand things are tight, EMILY! Would you consider $3.50?

She was now being haggled by an algorithm in her own kitchen.

She placed the phone face-down under a napkin.

Bane was lying across the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, serving as an immovable eighty-pound draft stopper.

A volunteer with a plastic clipboard walked down the sidewalk in khaki cargo shorts and white crew socks—the formal battle dress of suburban civic duty.

Bane opened one bloodshot eye, assessed the clipboard, determined that the upcoming referendum on municipal sewer bonds did not justify the caloric expense of standing up, and went back to sleep.

A dog of sound judgment.

Dinner

Dinner was two toasted English muffins with butter straight from the coldest shelf in the fridge, resulting in firm, greasy cubes riding on top of warm bread like yellow icebergs.

Travis was in the garage.

He was not monitoring the geopolitical landscape.

He was tension-testing bungee cords.

Travis had accumulated thirty-four bungee cords over fifteen years through unexplained domestic accretion. None matched. Four were missing their metal hooks entirely, terminating instead in frayed black knots.

He was hanging them from a pegboard by degree of elasticity.

Twang.

He pulled a black one down to the rim of an empty paint bucket.

Twang.

“The UV rays ruin the rubber if they sit near the window,” he said toward the wall. “Gotta rotate ’em.”

Sno’ Witty™ leaned against the garage doorframe, chewing a butter cube.

“The neighbor put a sign in,” she said. “The blue one.”

“Saw it,” Travis said, not looking up. “He’s thirty-one inches from the curb. Village code says thirty-six for non-permanent political lawn fixtures. Obstructs the sightline for backing out the riding mower.”

“Did you measure it?”

“Twice,” he said, smoothing a green cord. “Paced it while he was taking his cans to the street. He knows what he did.”

This is how the Midwest wages civil war. No barricades. Just municipal setback violations and cold stares over the hood of an idling snowblower.

Sno’ Witty™ returned to the kitchen table.

The evening mail had arrived.

There were five more glossy cards: two Brads, one Greg who promised to protect the children from zoning variances, a flyer warning that Greg was a menace to property taxes, and a coupon for four dollars off a synthetic oil change in Elk Grove.

Every candidate looked directly into the camera with the desperate intensity of people who believe the entire universe is watching the 8th Congressional District.

Sno’ Witty™ did not want a seat at the table.

She wanted a restraining order against cardstock heavier than sixty-pound gloss.

She stacked the mailers into a neat square, set the butter knife on top of them like a paperweight, and reached down to scratch Bane behind his left ear.

He produced a low, bubbling sigh that sounded like water draining from a basement sump pump.

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “Only forty-two more days, and then people will only be angry about the weather.”

She shut off the light, leaving democracy to figure itself out until morning.