The poor senator, referred by his daughter and the voters of Louisiana as Daddy, did not know how to explain the concept of death to his daughter following the white film and upside-down corpse of her goldfish in her bowl. He was sitting in his office and Valerie just came busting in holding the fish body by the orange scaly tail out of the water, flicking her wrist about and getting freshwater droplets and some fish scales all over the carpet and oak panels. Valerie was three and her tutors hadn’t covered social conventions yet and so she simply plopped the fish onto Daddy’s desk and asked, no, stated, “What.”

Daddy gave a blank stare at his daughter. Then said, “I have to use the bathroom.”

The senator ascended the three floors of his newly refurbished mansion (one had to always prepare for the next front porch campaign). He reached the top floor, yanked on a cord dangling from the ceiling to extend a hidden ladder so that he might enter the attic.

The rumors were true about Daddy, about the scriptwriter he kept in the attic. But believe me, it was not a love affair. After so many years campaigning it just gets hard to think for oneself. More of Daddy’s brain went into his image in the magazine covers and less into his head. So he used his scriptwriter to prepare for more personal events — interactions at Thanksgiving dinners, at the local Tamburlaine-town soccer games where his son Logan played, grocery store small talk. And so his scriptwriter, Bailey Zachs, lived in Daddy’s mansion attic.

The attic had a single window with a family of mute goldfinches. There was also a newly built restroom facilities complete with soap, a floor mattress, pen and paper, and a clever assortment of stuffed animals. He used shipping container crates as his desk per his specifications. It was just the right amount of cozy for an unpaid intern living for room and board and the right amount of novelty for the carpetbagger Daddy.

Daddy popped his head in on Bailey Zachs preparing conversation points for Daddy’s meeting with Senator Hughes. He said with his adopted and overly affected Southern accent, “Bales, I got an issue. My girl’s goldfish just died and I don’t know how to explain to her that it…y’know…”

“Just say it went to a farm or that it’s in a better place.”

“That would be disingenuous.”

“She’s three. This isn’t a fucking eulogy.”

“Bailey!” Daddy wagged his finger as he remained perched on the ladder. “This moment should have some weight to it. This is the first time she’ll experience the passing of a soul. Even the greatest theologians can’t explain the great beyond, can’t ration what lacks fathoms.”

Bailey Zachs began to write on a piece of paper. Then he scratched out the lines. He wrote and scratched as Daddy continued his monologue, the ladder wobbling underneath him as he gesticulated with one hand at a time.

“Death, that mute siren — enticing for its possibilities of immediate redemption. One must imagine the unnoble nature of the willing death. Suicide tacks away the catapult shock of the theft of life. And that too, under such rationing, is why political election. It is a form of sacrifice, a self-death for the greater interest, even if those don’t see it. They will call me the flash bulb martyr. The television mystic. Not for my prophet-teering but for my suicide to allow myself to be the vision of the future. One shouldn’t drain the swamp but invite their being into it. That poor goldfish…humans are always chasing gold…”

Bailey Zachs stood up from his crate desk in a fit of sweat. He handed Daddy the piece of paper; the paper was completely illegible on one side with it’s mess of black ink, fingerprints, and miscellany loops. The other side was blank. 

“Tell her one side is life, and the other side is death. She’ll get it.”

Daddy lifted up the paper and shouted, “But which side!”

Maybe it was the rare squawk of the goldfinch, the overstraining of his energy on the ladder, or Bailey Zach’s was fed up with his internship arrangement. Either way, Daddy fell from the attic ladder and down three flights of stairs. Because the maids were ironing the new carpet of the mansion, Daddy’s body flopped onto the front porch, his death a beautiful array of slapstick and Jacobean justice in an age where the golden coveted crowns are disappointingly invisible.