# MIDAS

What: I had some cracked idea for a story but this is as far as I got.
When: Jan 2017
Who: Me

# Story

Lori Bunel’s powder blue irises flickered metronomically as telegraph poles, adorned with her genial countenance, punctuated the sinusoidal barbed wire fence that passed through the oscilloscope of the Comcar window. Lori. Lori. Lori. Lori with devil horns. Lori. Lori with cock in mouth. Lori. Lori. Lori with “WITCH” written on face. Lori with cock in mouth. Lori. Lori.

“What the… Hey, Dom.” Her chief of staff looked up from his laptop. “Sorry Dom, could you ask the driver to turn around. I think I saw… I don’t know just tell him to go back a bit.” Dominic Eno tapped an invisible watch but Lori was adamant. “I’ll be two secs. We won’t miss the flight”.

Three weeks earlier, the polls had given her a 43% chance of retaining her seat of Hume but that was before her opponent, an independent candidate named Peter Hoist, was caught defacing her campaign posters. She won comfortably. In truth, Lori hadn’t spent anywhere near enough time kissing babies or the respective arses of Goulburn’s local businesses. But ever since Jennifer X had gone catatonic in May, the minister for Modelling, Innovation, Data and Simulation had been unable to leave Canberra. The acronym for her newly-minted department was a misnomer as, unlike the Phrygian King, everything Lori had touched in the last twelve months had turned to shit. The Prime Minister had caustically described the situation at MIDAS as “an abject fucking biometric nightmare.”

Lori and Dominic stepped out of the white BMW. A Linfox truck screamed past and dust swilred as they made their way to the wooden post and stared solicitously up at the placard. “What the fuck?” Dominic mumbled slowly to himself, bewildered.

“It’s not a drawing is it?”

“No…” He squinted. “No definitely not. Is that… Did you like… pose for this?”

Lori looked at her chief of staff with disdain. “Of course I fucking didn’t.” The poster was nearly indistinguishable from the rest. It had the same graphic design and the copy still read “LORI BUNEL. FEDERAL MEMBER FOR HUME.” Bunel also appeared to be wearing the same textured, navy-grey blazer and was sporting the same sand-coloured bob. Her visage, however, had transmogrified from warm and affable to terrified. Her mouth was agape as if shrieking and tears were streaming down her face. A kookaburra swooped down and broke the hypnotic trance of this grotesque sign. It stood on the grass beside the pole and started singing:

Ohhh, Lori, you fret about numbers,

While poor little Jessica slumbers,

But if her saturation gets too looooowwww,

Repercussions will be ferocious,

For a crime even more atrocious,

Than uncle Henri-Pierre’s in Kosovooooo.

“Shut up.” Lori kicked angrily at the bird and it flew away laughing.