“Look, up in the sky.”
“It’s a bird.”
“It’s a plane.”
“It’s Superman.”
“No, it’s the Chinese flag … isn’t it?”
“How is it doing that?”
“Only I could make that happen,” a portly man in a tattered black Brioni suit and stained red power tie boldly proclaims as he ambles awkwardly-but-confidently toward the small crowd of gawking onlookers.
“How did you make it happen, sir,” a wide-eyed, freckle-faced pre-adolescent boy asks the perceptibly proud braggart.
“Where’s the pilot? Is he invisible too?”
“When I speak, people listen,” the orange-haired man replies, gazing admiringly at the five-star red flag appearing perfectly motionless and seemingly suspended by nothing, some twenty feet above the runway.
“What did you say that caused that Chinese flag to fly through the skies and land here?” a bearded, older airport patron asks.
“And how is it staying up there?” Freckles interjects.
“When I was in charge, wonderful, beautiful, magical things happened. When I was in charge, we made invisible fighter jets. They were invisible; that means people couldn’t see them,” he adds, addressing the boy. “It’s the most beautiful thing, isn’t it—an invisible jet?” the obese man in the tattered black suit asks no one in particular.
“How can it be beautiful if we can’t see it?” Freckles’ mother asks, eyes furrowed.
For a few menacing seconds, Orange Hair fixes his gaze on Freckles’ mother before refocusing his eyes on the Communist Chinese flag. “It’s beautiful because I said it is.”
“Where’s the pilot? Is he invisible too?” the bearded old man asks.
“Yes. That’s part of the beautiful magic that I made happen.”
“Can you make me invisible?” Freckles asks, wide-eyed again.
Ignoring Freckles, Orange Hair resumes his soliloquy: “I told them to paint Chinese flags on our invisible F-35s so that our pilots could bomb the hell out of the Russians invading Ukraine and then the Russians would think it was the Chinks, and then the two commie countries would fight each other, and we could just sit back and watch. My idea. No one else could have thought of such a great plan. A beautiful plan. My plan.”
Lowering his volume—barely audible now—Orange Hair resumes, “If only it had worked like I planned. I’d have been freed from Vlad’s hold on me without all…” he looks around at the devastation. “All this.”
Orange Hair continues to mutter, seeming to forget the presence of a small audience: “He, Xi, all their people—along with all my liberal and RINO haters here in America—would be gone. Just me, Ivanka, Barron…” Orange Hair grimaces. “Okay, DJ, Eric, and Tiffany, too … and Melania, I guess.” He rolls his eyes. “But the planet would still be intact.”
Freckles, his mother, and several other bedraggled survivors look on, curiously, as Orange Hair drones on: “If only Vlad and Xi would have kept the nukes in their part of the world. I could have taken credit for America being the last superpower on earth. I could have regained my rightful place as president—forever—of all that would have remained.”
Orange Hair’s slumped shoulders and somber visage punctuate his sudden silence as a sudden breeze breaks the stillness and dislodges the red, five-star Chinese flag from the drab, gray tree's two leafless limbs that had kept it suspended above the drab, gray ruined runway.
As the flag flutters and then falls to the ground, Freckles asks his mother, “Did that man really make invisible jets?”
“No, son. What that man tried to make invisible was anyone who disagreed with him. But what he actually made invisible is the beauty of this planet and the billions of innocent people who were victims of his self- interests.”
“That and truth,” the bearded old man adds.