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Julie, Spirit of Laws

by Jason Heller

You always hear about couples that meet in the grocery store or the DMV or even detox. I met Julie on Election Day, in the line outside Meadowlark Elementary, my neighborhood’s designated polling place.
I was the guy standing there quietly, studying my cheat-sheet and fidgeting with my tie.

She was the girl with three heads, tentacles, with lightning for hair, dancing up and down the queue and screaming.

They say you see your lover in a way no one else does. That, in fact, your images of each other have nothing to do with either you or your partner—but instead stem from some ontological alchemy unique to your particular confluence of human souls.

Like I said, though: Julie wasn’t human.

Granted, everyone else saw her as human. No one gave her more than a glance. I bit my tongue when she galloped up to me and hollered some kind of political slogans in my face, puking sparks like a wind-up toy Godzilla.

Later, over dinner, I realized something: either I was crazy, or she was a monster with the power to cloud men’s minds.

“Am I crazy,” I eventually worked up the balls to ask her, ”or are you a monster with the power to cloud men’s minds?”

She reached a suckered tentacle across our plates of pasta and plucked my “I voted!” sticker off the lapel of my sauce-stained jacket.

“You gonna eat this?” she said.

Living with Julie was no picnic. It wasn’t even a sack lunch. It was more like scavenging the scorched earth for mutant turnips and making soup out of your sneakers.

“We get what we deserve,” she said once, after a long, anatomically scrambled lovemaking session that was to the symphony of sex what paintball wars are to fine art.

“What the fuck?” My mood was as bruised as my hips and ribs. “What’s that, the meaning of love?”

She laughed, a tornado-siren kind of sound. “That’s the meaning of democracy.” Then she slithered back on top of me, her three heads writhing like cheap Claymation.

The party couldn’t have been anything other than a disaster.

“Our third Halloween together!” Julie belched abysmally. She stood in front of the bedroom mirror trying to dangle a pirate’s eyepatch off her middle face. Behind it, a cluster of egglike eyes leaked quicksilver mucus.

“You look like a Christmas tree,” I told her.

“You look like hamburger,” she said. In fact, I kind of did. I was dressed as JFK. The Dealey Plaza version.

When the doorbell rang, we hurried out to welcome our guests. They were all friends of Julie. Horrifying. Lumps and pretzels of flesh, some as large as cows, others as small as house cats, littered with odd snouts and random bits of bionics.

Great costumes.

The night went fine at first. You know the type of party: Organic junk food, cheap beer as irony, gangsta rap played at polite volumes.
Then Julie started talking politics.

“Really,” she said while popping ice cubes into a bowl, “it all comes to down to his running mate. He’s the Trojan horse. That’s how we’re gonna retake the White House, finally set shit straight.”

An ostrich with a jeweled monocle and clockwork jaws was leaning against the refrigerator. He snorted. Fred, I think he said his name was.
“Still,” Fred countered, “it’s days away from the bloody election. And you’re speaking from the vantage of an agitator, Julie. An activist. Not all of us have the ability to work out in the open, to engage the populace directly.”

He looked at me sideways. “Or to, ahem, take token humans as trophies.”

The insult bubbled through the pool of Pabst that cushioned my brain.

“Hey, freak,” I slurred back at him. “Fuck you.”

Next thing I knew we were rolling on the kitchen floor. Shards of fake skull flew from my JFK costume, and steam hissed from the spots where my teeth tore Fred’s feathered, delicately mechanized face.
“You taste just like chicken, bitch!” is the last thing I remember yelling.

I’d been drunk since the Halloween party. Called in sick to work, helped Julie pack. She’d had enough, she told me the day after the fistfight with Fred.

“Have you also had enough of screwing that guy behind my back?” I accused.

“You look like shit when you pout,” she said. “You just don’t get it, do you? How you feel about me is your problem. Reality, dear, is determined by consensus. Montesquieu had it right: De l’Esprit des Lois. The Spirit of Laws. One day you’re the ruler, the next day you’re the ruled, and the pendulum may as well be the blade of a guillotine.
“Montesquieu was one of us, you know that? One of Fred’s direct ancestors, as a matter of fact. All the Architects and Founders were, from Paine to Hancock. See, democracy isn’t just a political machine. It’s a metaphysical one. You vote on what’s truth and what’s falsehood, what’s particle and what’s wave, what’s space and what’s time.”
She dangled a pair of panties over her open duffel bag like it was bread above the mouth of a starving man. “What’s fuckable or repulsive. You choose. So don’t play the victim with me.”

She looped her rubbery limbs around the handles of her baggage. “It’s been swell. Don’t forget to vote.” Then she poked her face into the air as if it were a waterfall and melted into it and was gone.

Three days later, my brain still throbbing with the telegraphed echoes of my Halloween hangover, I stood in line at Meadowlark Elementary. The same place I’d met Julie four years before. It was a lot quieter now: my sneakers squeaked on the gym floor as I shuffled to the voting booth. I drew the curtain tight behind me as if I were about to strip for a shower or try on a new pair of jeans in the mall.

All the names were there on display: candidates and isms boxed up like items on a sushi menu. Out of nowhere, Julie’s voice roared softly in my head. Rulers and the ruled, she’s said. Slaves and masters, terrorists and the terrified. Lovers and monsters. All waiting, according to her, for their chance to stamp their own reality on those who had stamped theirs on them.

“You get what you deserve,” I whispered to her as I shut my eyes and stabbed at the ballot.

Jason Heller's weird stories have been published or are forthcoming in
Sybil’s Garage, Farrago’s Wainscot, Apex Magazine, Kaleidotrope, and
others. He's the Denver editor of The Onion A.V. Club and plays guitar in a punk band called The Fire Drills. More may be gathered from
www.jasonmheller.blogspot.com.