I stand on an icy, windswept promontory and with a sense of satisfaction overlook a glassy lake, its surface black and smooth. Jutting out of the otherwise uninterrupted surface of the water is an icy finger of white, a dagger of inverted icicle, pointing at the Kodak clear blue sky, itself dotted with white clouds on their way to nowhere. On a day this clear, you'd fancy that you could see Russia from here if such a thing were indeed possible. It isn't. Not from here.
I've been planning this thing for a long time now, but it's tough to get any time alone with media whores, attention magnets, the puckered sphincters of American entertainment, spurting out shit and smearing it with unwashed hands and half-formed thoughts until the lines between what you need to know and every other imaginable thing are completely obscured, cease to exist, are cast down and forgotten relics of a quaint and cute little time before the now, which is all anybody can remember. Dropped into the cold wilderness, no escape planned, there's only so many times you can read the same comic books and White Fang. I ran out of tiny liquor bottles a long time ago. It finally happened, though, as I knew that it would - she came out here alone, without cameras, hunting or hiking or hiding something, it no longer matters - and now the gentle rise of fallen snow behind me on the ridge obscures the shallow, frozen grave of Sarah Palin.
Soft shoes on snow. She heard nothing, and there was just the mask coming off at the end.
No one will really mourn her. She'll generate about as much news coverage in death as she did in what passed for her life, but even her idiot, xenophobic, half-educated, false celebrity family will make the morning and evening and afternoon and brunchtime fucking talk show circuit and chat the woman into legend instead of mourning her. They might get another unwatchable cable show out of it - Sarah Palin's Alaskan Grave. And she'll still be gone. Which is all that matters as I clean my knives for the thousandth time. She had to die - even if I hadn't done it, one of the bears or moose or caribou or some fucking woods thing would have smelled the stink of desperation and fear, that all-encompassing dread that someone, somewhere would get their hands on an IQ test or texts or unburned records or something, and that maybe, this time, inert Americans would roll over and care, and she'd become undone. Predator to prey, the wind shifts just like that. Sometimes it shifts back, and I couldn't take that chance.
I am confident that the future will thank me, and that's why I have no exit strategy. Any moment now, a rift in space will open up, and time travelers from the future, able to pinpoint better than any of my contemporaries the significance of what I've done, and being fully aware of the debt that Western civilization, and indeed, the world, owes me, will step out from their time machine and offer me safe passage to the distant future, where I shall live a quiet life among the eco-terrorists and pansexual madpeople who rule the world with grey ethics when things swing back another way. Eco-terrorists have no meat, though, which is why I've been making moose or caribou or some fucking thing jerky for weeks; I'll have to ease my transition into the tofuture.
I smile as the air goes ozone behind me.
