This book is based on real events. Only the people, places, and events are fictionalized. The stupidity is 100% real.
Florida Governor Rhonda Santos sat in her mahogany paneled office behind a monolithic block of wood consciously modeled off the presidential Resolute Desk. Behind her, sunlight from two large windows filtered through frilly, cream-colored curtains that looked like they hadn’t been replaced or dusted since the Civil War. If she ever bothered to pull them aside—which she did not—Santos had a direct line of sight a mile down Duval Street to the Florida State Capitol, which famously looked exactly like an erect Brutalist concrete phallus flanked by a pair of domed marble testicles.
The State Seal hovered on the wall above her head while a brass chandelier cast insipid light onto a pair of leather couches and handful of chairs arrayed before the desk that were currently occupied by her morning brief team.
God, she hated her office.
Santos was unnaturally trim for a 55-year-old. She ascribed her slim figure—which she liked showing off via tastefully tight, collar to knee monochrome dresses—to spending an hour and a half in the gym every day, great genetics, and a secret liposuction regime with Palm Beach’s best plastic surgeon. Though only measuring five feet, two inches, she never wore anything taller than kitten heels because “men hate feeling small next to women.”
Ramrod-straight auburn hair fell between her shoulder blades while her face was a masterpiece of judiciously applied Botox and lip fillers because, as she told that same Palm Beach surgeon, she wanted to look like “an aunt you’d consider fucking after a few drinks at the family reunion.”
It was nine in the morning. She was tired. The mounting pressure of an inbound migraine pressed against her temples. Santos propped an elbow on the desk and shielded her eyes while four young, interchangeably male, interchangeably white, interchangeably country club handsome aides began their briefs.
“The American Association of People with Disabilities and the American Civil Liberties Union are suing the state’s de-handicapping infrastructure program,” began the aide she called Thing 1. “The attorney general is also threatening to join the suit…”
“The Attorney General is a fucking pussy,” muttered Santos without looking up. Her voice grew slowly more irate as she talked.
“I went to law school with that prick and he’s a giant, floppy, fucking pussy who isn’t going to do shit. He didn’t do shit when I banned Pride Month in the state, he didn’t do shit when I made public schools teach that slavery was a choice, and he’s not going to do shit now. As for the AAPD and ACLU, they can suck a dick. The suit is tied up in Seventh Judicial Circuit Court and Judge Setak hates the cripples as much as we do. Can someone get me a goddamned Advil?”
Thing 3 rushed out of the office.
“The case is in front of a friendly judge,” continued Thing 1. “But Attorney General Richards is making public statements that our program explicitly flouts the Americans with Disabilities Act which could bump this up to federal court…”
“Fucking let him!” cried Santos, losing her patience. She leaned into her chair and removed her hand from her eyes, which now flashed in pained anger. “The Appeals Circuit and Supreme Court are chock full of conservatives who are tired of living under our modern-day tyranny of cripples. So, full steam ahead on the infrastructure program. We keep removing handicapped bathroom stalls, curb ramps, those annoying crosswalk indicators that beep whenever you’re supposed to walk, and all other vestiges of cripple socialism. The government is done spending billions to cater to disabled people. They can pool their money and build their own elevators if they want. This country is fat enough as it is. Everyone should be taking the stairs, and where the fuck is my Advil!?”
Thing 3 burst back into the room with a glass of water and pair of pills.
“About fucking time!” exclaimed Santos, swiping the water from his hands and downing the pills. “Thing 3, you’re bumped down to Thing 4. Congrats, old Thing 4, you’re now new Thing 3. Y’all remember this because I won’t.”
The newly christened Thing 3 smiled smugly while his counterpart glared and plotted revenge against his numerically superior colleague.
“There’s just one more issue,” said Thing 1. “Protestors across the state are severely hampering construction crews. We’re slated to fall six months behind schedule, and the protests are only growing…”
“Then deploy the National Guard! We have 10,000 weekend warriors in this state, so put them on street corners to protect our construction workers from these crippled mobs! How hard can it be to beat someone in a wheelchair?”
“Yes, Madam Governor,” answered Thing 1 sheepishly.
He hesitated.
“I just foresee one problem, ma’am. If we deploy the entire state’s contingent of National Guard to protect construction sites, that means we won’t be able to use them for emergency hurricane response come summer…”
“For fuck’s sake, Thing 1!” yelled the governor, slamming a fist on the desk cover. “We’ll just use the Sunshine Guard!”
Originally sold as a volunteer civilian auxiliary organization meant to assist the National Guard and federal agencies with disaster relief missions, by the time of the Bulging (as hordes of Reddit memers began calling the event), the Sunshine Guard had morphed into a paramilitary force solely answerable to Rhonda Santos. Its budget had ballooned to hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, which it used to purchase drones, helicopters, patrol boats, planes, and thousands of assault rifles to arm alt-right recruits who wanted to play soldier and threaten the governor’s enemies without the bother of graduating Basic Training or facing overseas deployment to fight foreign adversaries who shot back.
Most recently, the Sunshine Guard had been sent to the Florida Keys to repel a supposed invasion of Haitian immigrants. When the imminent amphibious attacks never materialized, the mission parameters left 200 keyboard warriors in knockoff Army camo trudging up and down the Middle Keys’ mangrove swamps and hardwood hammocks to bravely fend off repeated assaults by hordes of mosquitoes, stinging gnats, and deer flies.
Another Sunshine Guard unit had been deployed to the Texas-Mexican frontier, where it was incorporated into the Lone Star State’s ongoing war against refugees attempting to protect their families from endemic drug violence and political chaos and work jobs wild horses couldn’t force Americans to take. Mirroring the hapless Keys detachment’s misadventures, these heroic Floridians were sent to a remote stretch of desert where they suffered 23 casualties to heat stroke, three to snake bites, and one to an as-yet undiscovered strain of super-gonorrhea—all without detaining a single immigrant.
These and other similar assignments helped Santos score political points with her right-wing base that detested wasteful government spending but would literally rather die before countenance a single dime being redirected from the governor’s toy soldiers to something as communistic as an affordable housing program.
Santos glared at her aides.
“Thing 1, you’re swapping with Thing 2,” said Santos. “I’m reorganizing the entire goddamned state today. Do you flunkies have anything else for me?”
“We do have one more topic of discussion,” mentioned the newly christened Thing 1.
“It better be good news,” snapped the governor.
“It might actually be, ma’am,” answered Thing 1. “There’s a neighborhood in southwestern Miami-Dade County named Seabridge Ridge that inexplicably rose about 150 feet in elevation.”
Santos gave a sharp laugh.
“You don’t say!” she cried. “How many casualties and how many displaced?”
“No casualties and about 15,000.”
“Are they my voters?”
“25% voted for you in the last election, 40% voted for your opponent, and 35% aren’t registered.”
“Bunch of libtards and illegals,” spat Santos. “Fuck ‘em. Send the emergency response team. Put ‘em up in hotels for a couple of months. Then they’re on their own.”
“Yes, madam governor,” replied Thing 1. “But I believe this might present an opportunity.”
Santos raised an eyebrow and leaned forward in her chair.
“OK, shoot your shot, but fuck it up and I’ll bump you down to Thing 6.”
Thing 1 nodded and plowed ahead, seemingly unperturbed.
“The opportunity is two-fold,” he explained. “Firstly, this neighborhood’s elevation makes it Florida’s most valuable real estate, literally overnight, as it is completely inured from the atmospheric phenomenon that may or may not be warming the planet that may or may not be derived from human activity that may or may not be raising sea levels and that may or may not threaten Florida’s entire coastline.”
Santos smirked.
“You’re dancing through a minefield, Thing 1,” she said. “But you haven’t blown up just yet. Continue.”
“Yes, madam governor,” he replied coolly. “The second opportunity is that every structure in the neighborhood has been flattened, which makes it the perfect clean slate for redevelopment. Its elevation will attract property insurers back to the state and draw high net worth individuals from around the world who want a guaranteed slice of Miami, regardless of the weather or climate. In other words, this is the deal of the century for a billionaire tech mogul and real estate investor you’ve been courting for your reelection campaign since he moved from California eight months ago.”
The governor pressed her fingers to her lips and smiled like a cartoon cat that had cornered its rodent nemesis.
“Alright, you Machiavellian little shit,” said Santos, narrowing her eyes. “Let’s see you land this plane. What about the property owners? They’ll want to be reimbursed at the neighborhood’s new, highly inflated value. Where do we get that money?”
“We don’t,” answered Thing 1. “70% of the residents are renters, so they don’t receive any compensation. As for the remaining property owners, you seize their land using eminent domain. Florida has the right to confiscate private property if it’s deemed in the public interest, but the state must give the owners equivalent plots to those they lost. Since Miami-Dade County is six feet above sea level, the only area with a comparable elevation to the neighborhood is now…”
He rifled through a folder, extracted a sheet of paper, and read from it.
“A landfill located in the south of the county colloquially known as Mount Trashmore.”
Santos threw herself back into her chair with a hearty laugh.
“OK, OK, very good!” she exclaimed, wiping a tear. “Very, very good. Congratulations, I’m going to do something I’ve literally never done for any of my aides in my 25 years in politics. From this moment on, you’ll no longer be Thing 1. You will henceforth be my only assistant who will have the honor of going by…”
She paused for effect.
“Thing 0. Congratulations.”
Thing 0 beamed and his colleagues glowered.
“OK, we just have a few loose ends to tie up,” continued the governor. “The area will be crawling with reporters and scientists who’ll be trying to figure out what caused the Bulge. We can’t let this happen under any circumstances because they might dig something up like a plutonium dump or a goddamned Indian burial site that’ll endanger the whole development. So, we’re announcing localized martial law and a state of emergency that’ll bar all unauthorized little pricks from entering the site. Any scientist caught within three miles will have all their state funding cut. And we’ll sue the hedge funds controlling snooping media companies back to the Stone Age. Put an electrified fence around the entire Bulge and, since the National Guard will be busy, deploy the Sunshine Guard to patrol inside the perimeter. And reach out to some of our contacts in those trigger-happy redneck militias. What are they called…”
“The Red Pillers and Los Niños Orgullosos,” said Thing 0.
“Yes, perfect, the Neckbeards and the Coconuts. Give them some surplus AR-15s and body armor—they’ll love that shit—and get them to patrol outside the fence. That’ll scare off any prying libtards.”
With her migraine seemingly gone, Governor Santos smiled at the aides.
“Thing 0, this has been a very good meeting. Good job.”
Her smile evaporated.
“The rest of you are still fucking flunkies. Step up your games! One more question before you get out of my sight. Seabreeze Ridge is a stupid fucking name. Have any of you given a thought to what we’d rename this neighborhood?”
Thing 0 didn’t give his associates half a second to respond.
“I thought Miami Heights might be a good rebrand,” he said.
Santos pointed an immaculately manicured finger at him.
“You’re fucking going places,” she replied. “Alright, all of you, get the fuck out of my office. And get me Griffin Elzos on the phone. Now!”
If you like our stories, check out The Miami Creation Myth hardcover.
