prompt: flip, title: pushing paper in misc. flash fiction

I could get you anything, anything you wanted, within reason, with a certain value for the word “reason”. It was so easy, of course, when the requests were mostly just street-drugs, prescription drugs and maybe the occasional weapon. Couldn’t afford a weekend’s worth of meth? Hells yes, I’d take all your ninja stars at thirty-cents on the dollar in trade. I’d figure out a way to flip out a profit, you’d be surprised how many marijuana growers are really into old kung-fu flicks. Gotta watch something while you wait for your inventory to mature under fifteen banks of grow lights.

When the plague finally hit in full force, I figured it wouldn’t be all that much different, junkies gotta junkie, even under “essential travel only” quarantines. I’d probably have to traffic in guns and ammo and whatnot a bit more, for those crazies who hoped the world was coming to an end so they could engage in their Walking Dead and Mad Max power-fantasy bullshit, but listening to their self-aggrandizing conspiracy theories was always part of the price of doing business for me. As long as their money was green, or their silver bars were real or the giant claymore battle sword they got from an infomercial for Cold Steel Knives was tradable, it was all worthwhile.

I could get you anything, anything you wanted, within reason, but when my usual customers started asking me for hand sanitizer and menstrual pads instead of psychedelic mushrooms and brass knuckles, I had to admit I was taken aback. This was all new territory for me. I could adapt, of course, just as well as the disease was adapting to people’s immunities, but I have to admit the whole thing was a shock to my system. I’d need a better distribution system. I’d need at least rudimentary warehouse space for all the toilet paper eight-packs I was getting paid in and with which I was equally paying out. The abandoned houses of the dead worked fine and the local police, well, they all needed clean hands too, if you’ll forgive the wordplay.

So, anyway, all of this is to say that in the end, now that the plague is past, I’m the richest man in a four-county radius and a whole lot of people who used to think of me as a drug-dealer scumbag now regard me as the hero who kept their asses nice and clean throughout the ten months of total lockdown quarantine, even if I did make a tidy-bowl profit off every transaction along the way.

But that’s all in the past, now that the vaccines are all in place and the survivors are rebuilding our society, with a certain value for the word “society”, and I have decided to take my wealth of experience and my wealth into a different yet very compatible field.

That’s why I’m asking for your vote to elect me to the local Congressional seat this November.

Clearly, I know how to get shit done.