LAST DOCUMENTED SIGHTING OF JASON KENNEY
This is the last documented sighting of our premier. Jason Kenney has been conspicuously absent ever since Alberta began regularly reporting over 1000 new coronavirus cases a day, with daily deaths in the double digits. The virus has weirdly not heard the news that the worst is supposed to be behind us, and unqualified MLA patsies are being forced to stumble through Alberta’s grainy Covid Plan that could just as easily have been conveyed with a simple flaming skull screaming in agony. Where’s Kenney in all this? Fearing the worst, I personally set out to find the Premier of Alberta.
An artisan always returns to admire their handiwork. I knew to find Kenny I’d need to investigate the epicentre of his planned inaction. In this pandemic, the lives Alberta’s of elderly has been the price that must be paid in order to enjoy a crisp Bud Light with our brahs and while telling our server to smize more. It’s like an Albertan spin on PST, where instead of money, we pay with the lives of our grandparents.
I am at the entrance of the retirement community in Calgary. It is the same where Jason Kenney claimed residence while he was an MP working in Ottawa. Years ago, this hallowed ground is where he wrote the equalization formula that now scaffolds the aggrieved vineyard of Albertan whine. If Kenney was anywhere, it would be here.
The wrought iron gate creaked with rusty giggles as I rattled it open. The empty streets were made no less eerie by winter’s predawn stillness. I crunched along diligent copycat townhouses in one thousand shades of blue until I stopped at one: Flat, front facing, white door and a sole curtained window. It was indistinguishable, save the immaculate dread that was now homesteading at the cockle of my hypos.
What inclined me to such coarseness I’ll never know, but I entered the house uninvited. I shut the door behind me and found myself standing in a beige living room. All beige. Beige credenzas. Beige chesterfields. Beige ottomans.
However, once the fog cleared from my glasses clarity twisted to paralyzing terror. What was previously old people furniture was in fact scores of pasty Kenney simulacra. Rows of nude, bellybuttonless, unblinking humanoids. They were lining the walls like shamed children. They were on all fours like sick cats. One was hanging from the roof, dangling like an unfuckable chandelier. I was aghast, agog. It was dead silent. My screams had either died on their way up my throat or were immediately absorbed in the jiggling fractal of the room’s infinite crannies. In slow-mo unison they all raised their hands. Their fingernails were undergrown, like little sunflower seeds on baby smooth eggplant fingers pointing towards a descending staircase at the far end of the room.
I walked across the room followed by unlit eyes. The variation between the mannish sentinels was the same scope of difference between Jason Kenney and Jeff “Kamikaze” Callaway. Callaway, I can only assume, was an early prototype of the doomed brood that insulated this room with clay-cool flesh and shallow breath. A proof of concept that by some freak swipe of chaos theory attained a near-sentience and become callow means to Kenney’s Machiavellian ends.
I transgressed the portal and made my way down the narrow staircase, shoulders brushing either wall. With a heavy push the door groaned amaw. On the other side was not another room, but an endless plane, a borderless agoraphobic galaxy.
Draped in a backdrop of twinkling pinprick souls sat Jason Kenney. Hunched over, cross legged, he was clutching a dried out and worthless strip of once-premium sirloin from the Fort Mac Fuel By Earl’s like fucking Gollum. Behind him, a skinless six boobied Adonis with a buffalo skull for a head danced to a mounting and furious internal rhythm. And lastly a small naked man and a Dodge Ram. It was unclear if he was trying to push the truck up some celestial hill or if they were merely fucking. The thick nothingness of it all invaded my multitudinous and puckered orifi.
Perspective melted away like a wet sugar bridge. The wobbly vision was a disconnected and malevolent performance. Sublimely impotent. Painted by rage and desperation. Then the truck guy lurched forward folding into the hydroformed high strength steel truck bed with a moist grunt, and I jolted through a neon microsecond causeway and awoke at home in bed.
I was covered in my own vomit and a pile of Skoal tins. But what was unusual about the scene was that the magnum size “Fuck Trudeau” poster hanging above my bed had disappeared. In its stead was this craven painting. 3ft x 4ft, acrylic on canvas.