key word: smorgasbord, title: pax ad nauseum in misc. flash fiction

It was time to eat. I live off the residue of human emotion, I eat them (to use your words) and the stronger ones taste the most delicious but large waves of weak negative emotions are what really keep me going. A spike of pure joy, the gush of a love newly-realized, these are the spice of my life, but the bulk of my diet is very much different. A stadium seething with simmering hatred, a campus overflowing with lingering rage, a neighborhood filled with unfocused crippling fear, for me, that is the good stuff. Ground chuck stretched out with breadcrumbs as opposed to, maybe, a well-cooked filet but it’s what keeps me alive. A man has to eat, even when you’re nothing like a man or a woman or a human at all. Meat is meat, as they say, and a …thing has to eat, even me.

And oh, how I ate. A big election cycle of yours, that is a smorgasbord of unease and anger that can never quite manifest in a meaningful way, a Las Vegas buffet, little Swedish meatballs in a delicate cream, a roast carved to order by a Frenchman in a fancy hat, those Thai chicken stickers in peanut sauce, sushi, pineapple pizza, everything beyond any one gourmand’s wildest dreams. You brief squabbling things, whenever you get a new set of chieftains or chiefs, by election, war or a royal succession, you people are a right goddamn emotional feast. It was indeed time to eat.

When you first settled the fertile crescent, I was called Uruk among other names, then down the line others called me Athens, followed by a spell when I was dubbed Roma then Londonium and, though these days you know me as America and whenever I starved for subliminal suffering, all you needed was a nudge toward regime-change and I feasted again. I’d go back to slumber then awake, maybe with some new title laid upon me, but I would continue while you winked in and out as if fireflies in the nightsky. I’ve eaten, I eat and for millennia, it seemed as though I would feast forever.

But for God’s sake, this is too much of a good thing, you have to stop at some point or I’m going to die. This last set of elections, you began debating who was a-running the next time before the chits were even tallied, the pain and the fear never ramps down and you’re stuffing me silly and I think that I might expire. I think I’ll soon bloat out and die. This much fear, this long without any pressure release, this much pain, this much hate without at least a nap, you’re going to destroy all yourselves and, oh by the way, I’ll finally die along the way.

Take a breath. Go walk your dog. Kiss your husband, do some yoga, before you all explode from infinite chieftain selection and my nearly-immortal self along with all you obsessive little jerks.