Sunshine on an Open Tomb

Our narrator is the brooding runt of a political dynasty known as The Family. Always a little tipsy, he is thoughtful but has trouble expressing himself thanks to his many physical defects as a result of generations of inbreeding. It is fall 1988 and his father, Poppy, is about to be appointed Prez of The Homeland. Desperate to fill air time at the advent of a 24-hour news cycle, even our narrator is suddenly of interest to The Media. So after years of living freely among The Barbarians, The Family has been forced to hide our narrator away in one of its secret hideouts, an estate he recalls fondly from his childhood. Moody over a love triangle, our narrator gets lost meandering the mansion’s long halls. Eventually exhausted by the chaos of the shape-shifting estate and his irresolvable love life, his missing secret service detail and the sudden intrusion of his favorite movie River’s Edge into his reality, our narrator cloisters himself deep under the estate in its bunker and constructs a tomb around himself out of soup cans. Here he gets to work to correct the popular mythology that he is his mother’s favorite son. His oldest brother currently downgraded from a State of Grace to simply Born Again-status for political reasons is already tapped to be Prez too. And maybe even the next brother after that. Unwittingly our narrator reveals the backstory of how The Family achieved such power, including its role in 11/22/63 and H2oGate. And he lets slip some of The Family’s big plans for The Homeland moving forward into The 90s and beyond into the 21st century.