Q

Rita dreaded Thursdays. Why? Every Thursday she had to tend her sister Jane’s bratty little son. Edgar was eight months old.

I know, right? Terrible age. Just cute enough to not hate and just hateful enough to not be cute. To top it off, Jane ‘claimed’ that Edgar was already speaking complete sentences and was bilingual, well versed in theology and had memorized pi to 69 digits. Every morning without fail Jane would tweet inspirational quotes she claimed had been relayed to her by Edgar. None but Jane had ever witnessed Edgar speaking and sincerely none but Jane believed it.

Rita pounded her small, Trump-like fists on the door, trying to awaken Jane without breaking the door down. No response. It was 10:13, 1:13 minutes late, and since Jane was nowhere to be seen or heard Rita figured she had left for work and left Edgar in the house. Rita’s pale-yellow eyes fell upon a shoe in the windowsill. It was Edgar’s.

That sneaky phucc with the ugly name had somehow escaped the house and while on his way out had scratched into the drywall ‘da mihi libertas morte.’ Roughly translated from Latin, this meant ‘give me liberty or give me death.’ Rita found herself effervescent with relief as she realized she no longer had to watch Edgar that day and could just sit on her phone watching cringe TikTok videos on Instagram while listening to 18-year-old expert venture capitalists on clubhouse.

After four hours of doing the afore-mentioned activities, a sliver of a conscience began creeping down Rita’s spine and rested on her palms in the form of sweat.

‘Maybe I should at least attempt to find Edgar…’ she thought. Quickly she rejected the thought, however, when she thought of the anger Jane would express to her when she noticed that Rita had let a good chance to get rid of Edgar slip through her mitts. I mean honestly, what could Edgar possibly be doing to the world that would be a problem?

Eventually Rita got bored. It was 5 o clock. Although she knew that she could just head home, (usually she left around 4-5 and left Edgar to play with the mannequins until Jane got home around 8) tonight she was too bored to go home and continue her same monotonous day just in a different room. She found her mind wandering into the abyss of sub-consciousness and the room slowly began to swirl around her.

A cricket chirped in the background.

“I wonder what he tastes like,” Rita spoke out loud. The sound of the cricket reminded Rita of homesteading in Kansas with her grandpa and living off dirty wheat and crickets in heat. A fly was buzzing around her head, stopping to rest on her shoulder while it licked its tongue. The steady tick of an old, off-time clock above the fridge was nearly lulling Rita to sleep. She wanted to sleep. She tried but failed to remember the last time she had even slept. Half-formed thoughts were floating around her head like snowflakes in Texas as she drifted even further into her daydream.

Rita couldn’t tell you when reality stopped, and her dream started. The only thing she knew for certain was the events of the dream:

Pausing between spoonsful of stale honeycomb cereal Rita looked up at a lengthy boy who had suddenly appeared in front of the teacher’s-desk-brown table she was sitting at.

“Edgar?” she queried, eyeing down the teen from middle to outside, “…is that you?”

Edgar said nothing. Rita was uncomfortable as he gently removed his cowboy boots, placing them in her now soggy cereal, and did the popular Charli D’amelio renegade dance. Rita was without words. Edgar continued to say nothing. He turned around, pulled up a chair, squatted down and placed a book she had not seen until now on the table. His earnest emerald eyes sparkled with an eagerness she had only witnessed once before in a Karen’s eyes when she had successfully called the cops on a poor gentleman trying to sell fake bitcoin passwords. The book was black.

It looked old, the book did. Rita found her mind trying to create a romantic backstory for the book. Just as she was picturing a gallant knight handing her the book, Edgar flipped the first page. It read, “I made this book.” Booorrinnng. Edgar closed the book again and Rita noticed a single letter ‘Q’ engraved in the cover.

Edgar disappeared. Rita rushed to the door but could not catch a glimpse of him. Panicking, Rita picked up the book in an attempt to unveil the meaning of the strange appearance. Hurriedly flashing through pages her gaze rested on a page with the words ‘look up’ centered in the page. In a daze she felt her complete attention sucked to the TV like your aunt to bad fashion and terrible men. The entire screen was filled with a strangely recognizable face.

“Edgar?” she found herself wondering aloud. “Is that you?”

Edgar, who was crawling at a good pace for 8months old, nodded his head. He was at the head of a massive group of odd-looking intelligence-starved men. He was wearing a weird looking fur cap with horns atop it and a single letter ‘Q’ engraved in the front. Grasping the book, she matched the two letters.

PHUCKKKK. It was Q-anon. Her very own nephew, Edgar, was the head and sole founder of the popular cult and now on live television was leading a stampede of yokels to the Capitol. Confused, frightened, and slightly hungry Rita sunk into the cushions on the couch and began to write her apology video to post on twitter for being related to Edgar. In her rush to get the apology out quick enough she had begun to write in the black book, but the writing would always disappear immediately after she penned it down. Frustrated, Rita threw the book across the room breaking Jane’s vase in which she had stored their mom.

Sweeping up the ashes and cleaning up the mess, Rita picked the book up once again. Clear as glass she could see her account balance blinking on the cover of the book. The longer she held the book, the lower her balance went, just like GameStop stocks. Too stunned to drop the book, her balance plummeted to well below 20,000$ and her entire body shuddered as she shrieked.

She woke herself up with that yell. Bliss flooded her mind as she realized it had all just been a dream. All of it. It was not even Thursday. And she still had a few hours before she had to wake up for Zoom classes. Delightfully sighing, she pulled the fuzzy bear-print blanket around her slightly cold shoulders and smiled in her mind about how crazy the dream had been.

Rita’s phone buzzed, and she pulled it out to see a tweet notification from Jane.

“I can’t believe Edgar is only 8 months…” the tweet started out, “…this morning he said, ‘mom, what if scientists found a way to make us live forever. Then, obviously, it would get boring. So instead, to keep it interesting, we decided to just have deadlines on our lives and have our mind cleared in between lives…?”

Rita cursed Edgar and climbed out of bed, no longer tired. She blinked several times as she stared at the clock on her nightstand. It read ‘Thursday’ instead of Wednesday as she originally thought. Rita dreaded Thursdays. Groaning to herself, she sat back on her bed, throwing her pillow and knocking her hand-painted portrait of Nancy Pelosi off the wall. Tumbling down, obviously hidden for years behind the portrait, was a little black book. Tentatively, she flipped the book over.

A single letter ‘Q’ was engraved in the cover.