by Guy Walker

They wait in the knee-deep red sludge that’s quietly humming like a muffled symphony. Justice Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh, Elena Kagan, and Neil Gorsuch all huddle inside the crowded and pregnant womb of a young woman. The claustrophobic air is pumped with a fog machine, choo-chooing red steam until it’s hard to see. The crimson, translucent glow casts a moody artificial sunset tone across their faces, as they stand around in a circle, looking solemn. Its slimy, nutrient-soaked walls dripping in the gelatinous muck. It reminds one of the same gurgling fortune that created life out of nothing, when all there was was space dust that is somehow kept glued together with gravitational pull, and life arose seemingly out of nowhere, from the gaseous vents at the bottom of the ocean, and somehow dominoed into complex self-aware lifeforms.

The nine Supreme Court Justices are hot. They’re tugging at the collars of their ridiculous gowns, wiping the sweat from their temples and brows. They’re waiting for the meeting to begin, rendering the same formal orchestration as the masked ball ritual scene in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. In fact, they’ve modeled every meeting based on that scene…or was it the other way around? Their dull and spiteful jitters in preparation to enact some demonic carnival for millions of women they’ll never know personally. A sexually repressed Clarence Thomas, whose face and overall posture has collapsed into an amoeba-like, formless glob, takes up what little light there is. His decades of cynicism was enough to kill the last of the pollinating bees during his earlier years as a lawyer for Monsanto.

Outside, there’s only horizons of asphalt and condominium complexes. Drones whiz by overhead, dropping off Amazon parcels of cat food and cordless headphones and purple curtains this time because you returned the green ones. Joe Rogan blares on the city-wide emergency loud speakers: “Look, I’m just keeping an open mind! I was on DMT once, and saw this baby crawl out of the soil and sat in my lap, and it was me!! It didn’t really look like me, but I knew it was me, you know what I mean? So when the woke mob says [he does his weak, girly liberal voice] ‘Oh, I’m pro-choice,’ what are they saying about the soil baby that’s a reflection of their own, you know? Besides, I have a sensory deprivation tank and a cold plunge!!!!” His testosterone booster injections trigger a delayed response with the gorilla coffee he drinks, and his neck veins burst, sending a spray of blood across his studio like a Jackson Pollock painting.

A jack-lifted truck drives down the empty street with an American flag waving behind. The conservatives won, and now flags are mandatory. The “Don’t Tread On Me” flags are mandated by every Republican governor. Every single house and car (which is all just tract housing and trucks with those fake bull testicles known as “truck nuts” dangling freely from the toe hitch) are issued at least one flag each, turning the low sky into a flittering arena of yellowed flotsam, the collective and intersecting butterfly-effect of their waving flags cause storms spanning from Norway to Thailand, the smoldering skies churning like cauldrons, as a tornado bursts onto the Siberian tundra with a baleful wrath, pulling up weeds and trees in huge clumps, lifting barns into a confetti of splinters. Roadkill fatalities caused from the swinging truck nuts skyrocket, hitting squirrels and raccoons and opossums square in the forehead—their evolutionary progression had started to adapt to dodge cars by freezing right under the middle of a car, but not yet realizing the fatal mistake of those huge brass nuts.

The Democrats protest all of this. To stop the storms, they march in their pink pussy hats; while some of their own self-immolating attendees protest the pink-pussy people because they say their hats are strictly pink and it implies only a white woman’s pussy is at risk, and therefore the grandmother pastime of knitting is inherently racist. College-age Republicans counter-protest in their hats, which are simply gargantuan felt testicles bobbing from side to side as they march. A buck-toothed man in oversized cargo shorts and a bulletproof vest, who walks with his feet pointed out like a ballerina’s, begins a chant: “I don’t eat pussy! And my dorm room is messy!” He pushes his bicycle helmet up above his eyebrows, so he can continue to avoid every crack in the sidewalk, in order not to break his mother’s back. Everyone in the group does this, hopping to-and-fro from one unbroken section of sidewalk to the next, creating a sort of embryonic form of goose-stepping. It’s hideous to watch. There’s even a conspiratorial faction of the right that believes the deterioration of our streets, the splintering of spiderweb cracked roads and sidewalks is an attempt from the elite to break more mother’s backs. The pro-life position, they claim, is having the full health of the mothers in their best interest. Can a mother with a broken back give birth to more babies? they ask in their meetings. The buck-toothed man’s mates continue the chant as before. Clearly, they have rehearsed this bit, as everyone knows the words without missing a beat. “A cute baby is pretty adorable! If I break my mom’s back, it would be real horrible!” They then all pull out framed photos of their mothers from their back pockets. “This is my mum! There are many like it, but this one is mine!” The featureless landscape of office buildings and condos and tract housing cul-de-sacs fills with more than the usual banal lurking contempt of its own, and the hatred becomes real. Battalions collect more forces. Everyone has their flags and their bumper stickers and their hats, as the sprawling hideous void of society materializes into a billowing storm cloud, the clattering fiefdoms beyond the city erupt in flames.

Back in the poor young woman’s womb, are the justices, shifting from side to side with impatience for the formal deliberation to begin. Amy Coney Barrett tries to force a smile while working through the maze of a rather complex Cat’s Cradle that she made for herself, but she breaks down in tears. She attempts to show Neil Gorsuch her creation, but he scowls, and then accomplishes hacking up a marble of mercurial-colored phlegm, telling the others with casual confidence that his rock hard little morsel of barf is the postmodern pearl, and they should all invest in his industrious hobby. The four-month-old developing fetus bobs over them like an illuminated orb, its gigantic size in comparison causes Roberts to faint. Under a Freudian understanding of psychosexual development of the id, Kavanaugh never developed beyond the oral stage, and so he simply sucks and licks and chews everything around him. He grabs one of Alito’s earlobes which sags like an empty canvas, and begins sucking on it like a pacifier, to which Alito admonishes: “You idiot! We’re here to look presentable. Even the Taliban have victoriously ruled that all women wear full gowns with a face covering, and all you can do is make us look like fools! Now get up, and straighten your own goddamn gown.” Alito then clears his throat as to get everyone’s attention and begin the meeting, but then this descends into a coughing fit. He gags, then wipes his eyes. “Ahem. Anyways, so happy you were all able to make it. We thought it’d be a fun treat for the viewers at home if we had this deliberation in-person. In person.” There’s a long silence, as the other justices look around aimlessly, not understanding another one of Alito’s strangely garish attempts at humor. Then, Kavanaugh finally gets it, and shrieks more than laughs, with a gaping lipless mouth. “That’s enough, Kavanuagh, quiet down,” to which Kavanaugh abruptly stops, and does the Charades game motion of zipping his lips shut. “We’re here to discuss the already infamous case, Chicks vs. The Harness of Serfdom,” Alito continues, “in which we’ll discuss such topics as When walking a woman on a leash, it’s better to have a harness around their chest than one tight collar around their neck; When ‘trimming the hedges’ or ‘mowing the lawn’, or any other libidinally suggestive garden duties, it’s your responsibility—not the State’s—to keep your mind clean. Umm, let’s see here…” he flips through some pages, squinting. “Oh right, right. Disney princesses won’t show midriff; Bellybuttons are simply that, buttons. They are not scars leftover from being in the womb, because there really is no womb; Ummmm, Now that condoms are illegal, the black market is popularizing criminals pulling them over their head like they used to with pantyhose…what should we do about that?; and lastly, and this is really my favorite, Mary Magdalene was a whore, so, do you think Jesus scored or what? Kavanaugh now presses his bellybutton with the palm of his hand over and over as if it was a buzzer in a game show, and makes the accompanying buzzer sound with his mouth. “It’s not that kind of button, you idiot!” Alito exclaims. “Why do you think it’s in the same vertical line as the buttons on a shirt? You think that’s just a coincidence? Think for once in your pathetic life.” Kavanaugh proceeds to wipe his nose with the length of his forearm. Amy Coney Barrett, being one of the few members of the ecumenical covenant, People of Praise, a parachurch community of about 1,700 members, most of whom are Catholic, and whose two founders were involved in the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and advocate for the practice of speaking in tongues, begins screaming in gibberish. Her eyes roll to the back of her head, and her hands raise to the ceiling, shivering, groping the sordid red air. “HAIL!!!! Shabada-diddy-slim-shady…TITS ON RATTLESNAKES!!!” Her glossolalia collapsing in on itself, and she gasps for air before beginning this routine again. Breyer finally looks up from the murky sludge that makes up the ground, and asks, “My God, the poor woman’s a schizophrenic.” Alito’s eyes widen in disbelief. “Are you nuts? This is a religious experience, she’s speaking to God.” “Oh, I see,” Breyer replies. “I’ll shut up then.”

A rumbling is felt under their feet. The dark red nutrient bath curdles into a thick foam. There used to be a fountain that gurgled like a fabulous spring, and the womb would hum in its coquettish mass, pulsing around the fetus as an invisible slow-moving lightning storm. These multitudinous involuntary forces aren’t like that of a clattering machine, but rather as a unified and benign world that manifests all of life’s forms from a subterranean infinity. But suddenly, there’s a rupture in the system, and the warm liquid cocoon turns into a huge fondu sculpture splashing violently from underground tremors. The nine Justices clamor for something to hold onto, something solid, but the viscous knee-deep ground slips out from under them, and they summersault backwards, dunked head-to-toe in the coruscating muck. Their meeting is ruined, sending Alito into a psychotic diatribe, his spit-soaked exclamations about how it’s not over ’til it’s over. The developing baby rolls over them, crushing Kavanaugh mid-scream, as Thomas easily drowns under his heavy black robes. There’s a struggle afoot, but only inside, as the young woman whom they are inside of casually gets ready for bed. She dropped her toothbrush, and had bent down to pick it up. She holds her tummy, feeling it rumble gently, the baby kicking the inner wall. She smiles, and takes a deep breath as she stands back up, sending the Justices again into a huge tidal forced baptism of blood and embryonic tissues.

Finally, in bed, her husband puts his ear up to her taut and glossy stomach, mistaking the Justices’ faint whimpers for the cute rumblings of their baby. His eyes widen in excitement, as he leans his ear in closer, obsessively trying to listen, as if he were listening for morse code inside a seashell. “Baby, I can hear the baby,” the husband says. Alito croaks his last feeble cry. “America is the violent extroversion of a people in exile. I was only trying to wrangle you back to a time and place of good behavior.” And his voice fades under the gurgling in the womb.