Around the time of the election, I started writing mostly square fictions about the president-elect. It began with one a day, then went to two, then three, then more. They were short because he has (we are told by many who know him) a small attention span, and because I have (I am saying now) a short attention span when it comes to him. They were square because I like the orderliness of the shape. It calms me. They were fiction because I don’t know the man, hope not to know him, but I know and have known plenty of people who display similar traits, and I liked the idea of mapping those traits onto a series of minor speculations. I don’t know if the devil is in the details, but fiction is.
The process of writing these mostly square fictions about the president-elect was addictive. I tried to stop after twenty, but failed. I tried to stop after fifty, but failed. Eventually there were more than a hundred. If they were addictive, they were also therapeutic. I was trying to get inside his head at the same time that I thought about how he was getting inside our head, and that cleared my head somewhat.
Here are five mostly square fictions about the president-elect, some of which were posted in this form at the time of their composition, some of which have been heavily reworked, and some of which have never been seen before.
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