NEW FICTION

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Yes, I know, editors aren’t supposed to run their own work on their litmags, but I do it anyway. You might say I’m the Donald Trump of this modest little literary site.)

He dreamt of a ballroom.

A big ballroom. BIG. In capitals.

An actual dream.

He’d first had the dream at age twelve. Or maybe seventeen, when he was a cadet at a military academy, sleeping in a dorm. A lonely time.

A vivid dream. The dream said, “Build the ballroom.”

But he’d had the first dream when he was twelve and his father took him to a big, beautiful hotel in Manhattan, or maybe Paris, or Zurich, and the hotel had a large ballroom. He’d seen ballrooms before, but not like this ballroom.

He’d said to himself, age twelve, looking at it, “That is one big beautiful ballroom.”

That night in the hotel he had a dream about a ballroom, not just any ballroom. HIS. Which meant it was the biggest most beautiful ballroom anyone had ever seen.

Now he was building his dream ballroom. Finally at last. The Big One. At the White House, which he now owned. Because he was the President.

Oh, he knew, everyone told him– aides he could fire with a move of his little finger– “But you don’t own it. You live in it but you don’t own it.”

But he owned it. He was the President and he owned it. And so he was changing it, to make it the most beautiful White House with the biggest most beautiful ballroom ever seen. It was why he’d become President, he realized. The motivation. To build the ballroom.

“Don’t put that pillar over there!” he yelled at a foreman in a white hard hat.

You knew who the foremen were because they wore white hard hats, not blue ones. Or yellow ones.

“Read the blueprints! Doesn’t anyone read blueprints? And don’t connect the copper wiring to the glass wiring. Do not do that. They don’t connect. You do not connect them!”

Sheesh! he said to himself.

Aides scurried around him and moved him in different directions, but they didn’t know. Only he knew. KNEW.

Which is why he was President.

Tractors roared, earth moved, wings of the White House crumbled before his eyes, concussions and visions of noise and chaos, and he loved it because he knew when it was over, the project complete– tiles gleaming and gold statues positioned everywhere and the richest, wealthiest most famous guests, trillionaires and kings– he knew, KNEW, all the effort would result and had resulted in the world’s biggest and most beautiful ballroom.

-Karl Wenclas