The Only One Who Saw This Coming

At night, before Kellyanne folds up into her hollowed body, she removes her blouse. Then she removes another blouse. Underneath the top two blouses are hundreds more blouses. Well, we can only assume. In fact no one, not even Kellyanne herself, has taken off all the blouses. It’s blouses all the way down.

But once she has taken off that day’s blouses, tainted by the news cycle and libtard snowflakes, she feels more relaxed, more herself. “Who is Kellyanne?” she wants to ask, but is not yet brave enough to tackle that, nor find out the answer. Instead, she scrolls through her phone looking at screenshots of the neo-nazi memes of the day that made her smile. It soothes her.

In bed she is cocooned by her gold-spun hair. The full moon wanes. Kellyanne whispers softly, “in heaven there is no fake news” before drifting off into a heavily medicated sleep.

Getting up in the morning was always difficult for her. Alarms never worked and even bright lights only seemed to lull her into a deeper snooze. What did do the trick, though, was knowing Ann Coulter was already up and out there working harder than she was. Of course, Ann worked harder than anyone, because she medically was unable to sleep. Nothing made Kellyanne more jealous. For years she had been scouring the black market for some drugs that would make her not sleep, or at least live forever. She wasn’t as naturally hateful as Ann, but if she had learned anything in life, there was a spell for everything.

She had heard rumors that Ann was able to kick dogs without feeling any remorse. Kellyanne had attempted this a number of times, and while she was able to kick the dog just fine, it was actually finding someone to trust her with their dog that was tricky. Should she buy her own dog? Perhaps. She tweeted out a dog emoji to remind herself of this thought.

She threw off the covers and flipped on the television.

Unbelievable. Ann was already on a morning talk show. Amazing. How did she do it? Kellyanne skipped brushing her hair and dunked her head in a bucket of Aquanet. She’d been doing this for a number of years instead of drinking coffee. It didn’t work but it made her eyes never fully close.

“Self care” was a phrase she only ever heard the enemy use, so she hated it on principle. But recently, after these 22-hour screaming matches with Anderson on CNN and berating single mothers on public transportation, Kellyanne yearned to take care of herself. All beauty funds in the campaign were allotted to either the diesel fuel that ran Ivanka’s wind machine or the small-batch bleach for Pence’s asshole. Kellyanne decided to treat herself to a makeover. Nothing fancy, but she was going to give herself a pedicure.

As she drew a hot, shallow bath to soak her feet in, she went to take her heels off. They were stuck. It had been 447 days since she had taken her shoes off and it appeared that her heels had actually fused to her feet. This wasn’t going to stop her. She was Kellyanne, goddamnit. She summoned the actual devil to babysit her children while we was out on the campaign trail. (No woman would ever be allowed to care for her offspring as well as she could.)

She dipped her feet into the scalding hot water and let out a sharp sob. The plastic and warped animal hides of the shoe dug deeper into her own heel.

Once she was done soaking, she dried off her feet with the embroidered hand towels Ivanka gave her with Ivanka’s initials on them. What color would she choose? Red? No, too on the nose. Purple? No, she wasn’t a lesbian anymore, thanks to the years of de-programming. She would paint her toes a soft peach.

She unscrewed the bottle, a gift from Tiffany, and painted over where each nail would be had her high heel not fused over her entire foot. It was beautiful in a terrible way. But more importantly, Kellyanne enjoyed the intense fumes of the year-old polish. What she would give to dive into a vat of it and die.

“Ain’t I A Woman?” she whispered out loud as she looked in the mirror. It was a phrase she heard Ann Coulter say once and always loved. “And ain’t I going to kill every other last woman on this planet, so help me God?” she thought as she walked out the door to start the day, blood trailing from her dainty ankles.

“Less lower teeth,” she thought as she looked into the mirror. That had always been the problem when she smiled. Her jaw overtook her grin, though passively so. It was as if the lower half of Kellyanne’s face was already departing this mortal plane and settling into the next.

Her phone dinged. It was Cohen. He needed her to stand in for him on CNN that afternoon. He didn’t give a reason, but she could only assume it had to do with his recent botched Juvederm treatment. She put the phone back down without replying. Should she get cheek fillers, or perhaps under-eye? What would bring her jaw back to life?

Suddenly, a memory flashed before her, one that she had spent years repressing. Camden, New Jersey. 1987. Her, Kellyanne, running a quick errand at the Stop N’ Shop when a young witch approached her and gently ran her bony finger along her jaw.

“What do you want?” Kellyanne demanded, clutching the Staysput thigh-highs she was in line to purchase. What came out of the young witch’s mouth were not words. No, instead she inhaled a faint whistle, her finger still against Kellyanne’s face.

“Gross! I hate you!” Kellyanne remembered screaming at the witch but also found herself saying out loud in this current moment. That startled her. She cradled her own jaw. The spot where the witch had touched her all those years ago was still numb. Outside, a lark hatching fell from its nest.

She picked up her phone. “I can be there” she responded to Cohen. “I always love being on TV.”

As soon as she realized she was bleeding, Kellyanne unclenched her bite on her own hand. She turned off the television, shut down her computer and meditated on the reality that there would be days and weeks when the attention would be on other blonde women, like Betsy, and not herself. She had to be okay with that.

She wasn’t, of course. In fact, she even tried to separate herself from the other blondes on the team by being the one with “bad blonde hair” but that hardly made her feel better. Why was suddenly everyone so obsessed with Betsy? Betsy worked with children (even poor ones) and had no sex appeal. Kellyanne needed to do something drastic.

She phoned the hotel lobby.

“Hello! How may we help you?”

“This is Kellyanne.”

“Yes, Ms, Conway. How can we help you today?”

“I’ve drenched the room in gasoline and Aqua-net and I’m about to light a match. It’s Hillary’s fault. And Betsy’s.”

She hung up the phone, picked her purse up off the bed and snuck out the back exit of the hotel. A rush of adrenaline hit her as she crossed the street. A taxi cab took too wide a turn and narrowly missed crushing her to death. She did not notice. She was too anxious for the Google alert notifications Barron set up for her name to start pinging.

Later that evening, she would appear on CNN and call it all fake news. Had there ever been a woman as powerful as she?