Cake Plates, Little Girls, and Old Men

The helicopters had been bringing sandbags all morning.

Nobody knew why and honestly, they had assumed they were full of sand.

They were labeled, flour and sugar.

But they had to be white sand.

The military helicopters dropped them in enormous nets onto the roof of the government building, where important men in white shirts immediately began throwing them over the side.

Nobody knew why they were doing that either.

The Big Man Boss Leader knew.

He knew everything.

He wore a white suit and a very large white hat and looked a little like Boss Hogg, if Boss Hogg had been inflated for a Macy’s parade.

He was a large man, but not a solid-looking one.

There was something buoyant about him. Gassy.

The people sometimes imagined that a strong enough wind might catch beneath his jacket and lift him gently into the sky.

No one really wished him harm. They just wished he’d disappear. He was welcome to become like the moon. A satellite memorial. He could even put his name on it. Obviously he would! BigBossMan* Forever in you we trust. NOT!

This was generally considered an inappropriate thing to hope for and was censored from internal thoughts.

Still, people hoped even if their hope appeared as a helpless void.

They of course never imagined him floating away like a hot-air balloon, his Big Hat supporters clinging to ropes beneath him, rising one by one over the government building and disappearing into a beautiful blue distance.

There was no wind today.

There were only whirligig helicopters and sandbags.

And the Big Man Boss Leader would not stop talking.

"I was right," he said, tossing a sandbag over the edge. “They don’t disrupt the birds or kill nesting sites!”

He ate a boiled egg.

He dusted his hands.

"I knew what I was doing. It was those power producing ‘wind’ mines. MINES! Not mine! Dangerous to all and so noisy!!!”

Another sandbag.

"She was wrong."

Another.

"That girl was wrong wrong wrong."

The girl he was talking about was being kept under a cake plate.

It was a large glass cake plate, obviously.

She could stand beneath it.

Mostly.

If she tilted her head.

She looked like Miley Cyrus.

She sounded like Miley Cyrus.

She was not Miley Cyrus.

There were legal reasons why everyone agreed she was definitely not Miley Cyrus.

Her crime had been saying that the Big Man Boss Leader wasn't real.

More specifically, she had said he was made of cake.

This had caused considerable excitement because quite a lot of people had already suspected this.

There was something about the white suit.

The smoothness.

The peculiar puffiness around the middle.

The way his face seemed decorated rather than assembled.

For several wonderful hours, people believed the Big Man Boss Leader might actually be an enormous cake.

There was discussion of forks.

She had said that all his supporters really were hungry for his cake and wanted to eat him.

This was grotesque and too close to the truth.

It was immediately established that he was not cake on 999 pop-up websites with very high SEO optimization ranking calculations so if you typed B or C A or LEA - it immediately filled the search bar for you and directed you to BOSS MAN IS SOLID CAKE IS A TERRORIST LIE and LEADER IS PERFECTLY PEAR SHAPED.

Him not being made of cake was disappointing. More than even he realized.

The government, however, remained deeply concerned about the accusation.

Calling the Big Man Boss Leader cake was dangerous.

Dangerous statements caused unrest.

Unrest caused riots.

Therefore, saying the Big Man Boss Leader was made of cake was inciting a riot.

And because the statement specifically involved cake, the girl was designated a member of the Anti-Cake Terrorist Society.

ANTS.

Everyone knew ants were terrible at picnics.

They were especially dangerous around sweet treats.

And cake.

The logic was impeccable.

Cake-plate prisons immediately went into production in all fifty states.

The territories stayed out of this and this enraged Cake Plate Factory Owners and Big Boss Man Leader. He said he’d never make them states and would eventually make them resorts then make them into states once he did.

ANYWAY, the girl was a country singer and she was simply the first one put on display.

Her grandfather stood nearby on the roof.

He was a senator.

A very old senator.

Really, extremely old.

He was one of the opposition senators the government kept around to demonstrate that opposition was completely tolerated.

More than tolerated.

Welcomed.

Included.

Listened to.

The Big Man Boss Leader explained this while being mean to him.

"You see?" he said to the cameras. "We listen to everybody."

The elderly senator nodded.

The Big Man Boss Leader turned away from him and picked up another sandbag.

"And another thing about that crazy deranged girl—"

The old senator’s leg twitched. It ached. He stretched it. He accidently nudged Big Man Boss Leader.

It was barely a nudge.

It wasn't even intentional.

Was it Providence? Fate? Divine Restless Leg Syndrome?

But the Big Man Boss Leader had always been more buoyant than he looked.

Damn it.

His arms went out.

His enormous white hat lifted.

For one magnificent second, everyone thought the wind had finally come.

To save him of course.

Then he disappeared over the edge.

There was silence.

The elderly senator looked down.

The girl under the cake plate looked up.

Big Boss Man Leader glared at her as he fell for what felt to him was forever, but for everyone else was 6.69 seconds. Approximately.

They’d have to check the CCTV recordings.

But while all lenses were trained on his falling mass, the edge of the glass cake plate lifted.

She crawled out.

Nobody stopped her.

This was partly because everyone was still looking over the side of the building and partly because the helicopters had arrived with more sandbags.

The girl was smuggled away.

Nobody knew exactly who did the smuggling.

There was a car.

Then a truck.

Possibly a bus.

Then a private plane.

Eventually she arrived at a secret hideout filled with other people who had disappeared.

Patrick Swayze was there.

He was making macaroni and cheese with Anthony Bordain.

Anthony held something in a bag.

Patrick shook his head, “No, we are most definitely not adding that! This is a real grandma’s mac and cheese.”

The girl sat down at the table.

Someone handed her a bowl.

"Are we safe?" she asked.

Patrick Swayze considered this.

"We have no idea."

He gave her a spoon.

"But there's Swayze mac and cheese."

Anthony forgot about the bags he had brought, picked up a large spoon, and just thoroughly enjoyed Grandma Swayze’s Mac and Cheese.