hollow.lexicon

The President (you know which, don’t say the name aloud—it shivers when heard) was melting, softly, into the antique upholstery. The Resolute Desk, once oak, now a breathing, pulsing gland, exhaled executive orders in blood-cursive, twitching with sigils of ungrammar. The walls blinked.

He spoke into the red phone, not connected to any known line, but it hummed back in feral semaphore. “Send in the codes,” he whispered, though no lips moved. The air translated it to birdscratch. Somewhere in Delaware, a pigeon exploded.

There were once advisors, yes, and yes-men with suits tailored by the stitch-gnomes of consensus. Now they were husks, mouthfuls of dry approval nodding like pendulums, hollow suits echoing “bipartisan” in Möbius tone. His Cabinet had literal shelves now—each secretary pickled in jars, labeled with ironic labels: “Secretary of Future Regrets,” “Postmaster of Delusions,” “Agrarian Lies.”

The curtains behind him whispered poll numbers in a dialect only known to termites. He tried to pray, but every god line was jammed with voicemails from the drowned. Jehovah’s inbox full. Allah auto-replied in windchimes. The Christ-avatar responded in hashtags. Even the eldritch lords of the deep bureaucracy sent back “Unsubscribe.”

His speechwriter had become a typewriter made of teeth. Every key press bit him in Morse code. He dictated his last address to the Nation thus:

“My fellow indecipherables. I stand before behind within you not as leader but as leaking membrane. The Constitution drips in my lap like yolk. The eagle pecked my dreams to shreds and built a nest in my chest cavity. It hurts when I sign bills—because they scream.”

Then came the collapse of syntax: a hail of misplaced modifiers, phallic clauses, and subordinate insubordination. The teleprompter glitched into Hebrew, then birdsong, then whale lament. He kept speaking. His tongue stretched, splitting into two, then four, then a flag.

The ghost of Nixon cackled from the tapes. FDR rolled faster. Lincoln's portrait wept oil, slow and black, until the frame drowned. No Secret Service—only Secrets now. They slithered the halls in pinstriped skin, listening to the gnashing gears beneath democracy’s floorboards.

He tried to veto the Sun. Signed in triplicate. The Sun laughed. It began writing back in ultraviolet. The bill returned: EXECUTIVE DISSONANCE—APPROVED.

And in the center of it all, a fissure opened on the Seal. Not the beast below, not yet, but its mouth. It spoke no language—only un-word. Un, like a prefix for everything. Unknit. Unking. Unmake.

He tried to nuke the silence.

The button was soft. It sighed when pressed. The codes returned corrupted: ☍☍☍☍☍☍☍☍. The launch keys melted into sugar.

Outside, the sky grew a fourth color. Birds sang in Gregorian binary. The Flag stood still, then gently folded itself into a cube and wept.

In the final moments before the language dissolved him entirely, he turned to the window and saw his reflection mouthing:

“I never had thoughts. Only slogans pretending.”

Then nothing. Not silence—post-communication. Where even thought is treason. And the veto pen writes YOU next.