23rd July – Pretty girl, beware of his heart of gold. This heart is cold.

The Golden Fleecer

a reworking of Ovid’s Golden Touch [https://amzn.eu/d/0f4OwBFU], by guest columnist, Hans Loë.

The Stray

It had been but a month since King Donald had declared himself Formidable King Donald by Executive Order. But it had done nothing to lift him from his malaise.

His Tsar of honours, titles, pronouns and terms of reference, Doug Bumbango, not wishing to add another layer of duties to his cultural compliance mandate, had indicated that a pass would be given to anyone who made an effort with King Donald’s new title. It had happened on a day when his staff were busy trying to control a group of protestors who refused to cross the road by the designated pedestrian crossings. A couple of them had had to be shot to make an example to the others, and it had drawn a disproportionate level of attention. So that he might give his full attention to that matter, Doug had instructed his officers in the eastern suburbs of the town to let pass anyone who hadn’t yet mastered, “Formidable King Donald. Provided they made an effort.”

Donald’s subjects, on pain of being sent to the Ice Tower somewhere in Greenland, Scandinavia, well close to the North Pole —whatever, had adopted his royal decree, somewhat, and soon, there was hardly a person in the land who hadn’t adopted the popular abbreviated form of his new title, F-King Donald.

Some of them said, “Eff King Donald,” whereas others flowed the F into king, to make their challenge to the monarch in terms of an obviously faux-compliance. Yet others made play of Bumbango’s limited command of English, and shouted things like, “All hail Formed-of-lard King Donald.” Some others, having heard only “Eff” thought that it stood for fat.

Well, one way or another, Bumbango gave up policing the brief to concentrate on other matters.

 “If only I could make my subjects see how I’m so good at everything I turn my hand to, especially business, they’d respect me, and they’d realise how lucky they were to live under the rule of someone so gifted.”

He thought about hospitals for a moment, then dogs, of which he was scared, and that time he didn’t get a hole-in-one but everyone said that in a way he did, because it would have gone in had it not been so windy, so it counted anyway. Then he thought about giving himself a new plaque to commemorate the first hole-in-one on that course (by a senior board member). Then he thought about being F-king Donald again, and how some people didn’t understand that F was a curse word, and thought that it stood for fat.

He so desperately yearned to find the trigger that would turn the tide back in his direction. A commanding newspaper editorial, perhaps —but all the papers that didn’t do his bidding were already closed, or failing; and those that did… well, in their way, they only added to this groundswell of negativity. From common people! People who once looked to him as their saviour!

“Perhaps I’m not rich enough,” he thought. “I’m king rich, sure, but mogul rich? Tycoon rich? Miles off! That’s what people respect these days. Real wealth. That’s what’s worth being born to. Deep rooted money. Or if it must be created, unassailable prosperity. You see it in those that have it. Their clothes, the way they hang, proper creases. It’s not that a king doesn’t have access to fine tailors, it’s that people who possess riches beyond their dreams, can exclude everyone else from the very best in life, by making it exclusively their own. That is why I fail as a king to my subjects. They no longer see me as a cut above the rest. They look at me, and my baggy suits, and think that I belong on the rung below.”

How long had they been mining stable coins now? And how many had they found? God, they must be like finding diamonds in a desert, or your golf ball when it goes in the long grass by the graveyard section. And there was his own, personal gold mining project, and those nuggets he’d inherited that still hadn’t turned up.

“Who could love a poor king?” he said to his reflection. It stared back at him, without an answer, pale yet tanned; flabby yet thinning. And those trousers! One minute flapping about like Charleston Bags, the next bulging like bean bags. He had to have them made a size up so that they could contain the apparatus that absorbed the light industrial waste that sloshed around his system, and occasionally leaked. But look at them! They hardly said, Madison Avenue, did they?

“What was that thing his doctor had said? Something about a stable, or stabilisers, was it? Yes, that was it, that he’d become more stable. Stabler. A stable king. They’d like that. A stable coin could have a picture of his head on them. That would work. Were they stable coins? Was that the proper name? So many things rushing round my mind at once. What coins weren’t stable coins, for goodness sake?

“I have been mining little bitty stable coins,” he said, rehearsing himself for his weekly radio address, to see how it sounded. He’d save it up and ask Natalie. Ask her if it sounded like he was doing it for the good of everyone. Then he said, “There is no coin more stable than me in the whole Treasury,” just in case he needed to reinforce the point, should they make him use one of those unreliable teleprompters, and he lost his thread.

It sounded good. An authoritative statement of fact. Grounded, strong and truthful. “I am stable. A stable ruler is a source of comfort to his people.”

He circled his bedroom again, switching off some of the televisions as he did. He had barely convinced himself —though that was difficult, because he was one of the smartest people he knew. He exhaled a long sigh and went back to the window.

“Stable? I like it, but it’s not the same as saying, He is rich. Nor does it prove, which was actually the case, that He was God’s anointed ruler. You didn’t exactly hear anyone say that anymore these days.”

The truth was, he was even closer to God than that. Related, some say. No one knew that, and his useless staff employed to announce and broadcast such things never so much as talked about it, let alone tell anyone.

His father did. He often heard him shouting at his mother when he went in to kiss her goodnight, “Who exactly is he? Jesus Christ?”

Why couldn’t his subjects see that too? If only he could find the gold. The gold that was given to him at his baby shower. That would prove it all. And then, all that stable stuff, the stable coins, what the doctor had said —it would all kick in. Once the nugget was found, they’d all start to interpret his words differently.

4-D chess they’d say. Well, his loyal supporters would. And so that his words could be interpreted properly for the rest of them, they’d have to ask his religious mentor to interpret it all properly for them. That blonde piece who zoned out, and went into her Hillbilly Swahili schtick when she was hearing the word of the Almighty. Then there’d be some changes.

No wonder he was so fixated on stables, they’d say. He’s been fucking with us all along. Trying to tell us who he really was. Opening up his church, and his heart, and his ministries, to anyone who’d listen. And now, see, he’s so rich. It’s all proved beyond doubt. Who could gainsay that?

The thinking wearied him. He sat alone high in his tower of white stone, peering out over the lawns where golf chariots rolled. Then suddenly, through the fence just behind the green on the sixth hole, where he had been hiding, emerged a strange creature. It had the air of an athlete like him, but not as good. He didn’t know him yet, but it would be Tater, the Satyr: a scary, hairless creature who had fallen from a helicopter and swum to safety, washing up on the shores of F-King Donald’s summer retreat.

Donald called for the strange creature to be captured, and sent to him. And soon, Tater was brought before him, not to his bedroom, where he’d first spotted him from the window, no one was allowed in there, but from an ante room, which served as a sort of wash-down unit. A place where Donald spent much of his downtime, and had started to take meetings in there too.

When that other oily creature, who now works in Homeland Security first came into Donald’s service, he worked the stink room, as it was called back then, as Donald’s personal assistant. But since moving him on, this new clerk embraced the job in a way that pleased Donald very much. For one, he brought with him his own clack-stick, unbidden. And unlike the previous incumbent, he had never once required Donald to look at his own discharge, whatever the season. He put it to one side, then did his research on it later, when Donald had vacated the place.

“This thing’s nowhere near as ugly as he looks. Close up, he’s not unlike Pinky Herman,” thought Donald as he crouched to allow his man servant access to the inner ledges and caves of what, in the few times they’d exchanged words, they most often referred to as the chute.

He invited Tater to tell his story, which he did, lisping even better than the weirdo in Homeland Security.

He told Donald of a faraway domain, surrounded by seas, where his master, a god he said, allowed him to do as he pleased, provided that he first served his master’s needs. This delighted Donald, especially when he told him about the cells, and cellars, and dungeons, where every good person he found was kept until they came to learn how kind he was. “He’s just like me,” thought Donald, but he wasn’t sure whether he was thinking about Tater, or Tater’s master.

“Does he know actual God?” asked Donald, “because He and I are pretty close, and actually…”

“He knows all the gods. They sometimes meet on our mountain paradise,” said Tater.

“I love the way you speak,” said Donald, trying to make it sound like he was still in charge of the conversation. “That sort of sideways lisp thing. Are you a cigar smoker by any chance? Or have you had a stroke. My doctor has been telling me about strokes. Says I’m very stable. The most stable monarch he’s ever treated. And I don’t need any treatment because of it.”

“No,” said Tater. “That’s where my cellmate used to shove his cock.”

The blunt talk rather stopped Donald in his tracks. “Was he trying to intimidate Donald with it? He was an odd-looking creature —the sort of thing that they say understands the natural hierarchy of the earth implicitly. I’ll tell him my new name, that’ll do it,” thought Donald.

“And what of your name?” asked Donald. “Tater? That’s pretty strange for a satyr. Most satyrs I’ve met have got a ‘the’ in the middle. I used to have a “the” but I changed it to Fabulous instead. No, I mean Formidable, fantastic. One of the Fs.”

Tater flashed a pimply grin. “Alas, my name is another legacy of my confinement. The others used to take it in turns to kick me in the bollocks as hard as they could.”

“Ooh, nasty,” said Donald. “That only happened to me once, when I was at military academy, but mine stayed up there, so they never did it again.”

“Mine have been the making of me,” said Tater. “Great big swollen taters, I’ve got. Women love them. Especially when they’re all smooth and bald, which mine are, obviously. And moisturized,” he added.

“Evidentially,” said Donald. “Those parts always work better if they’ve got a bit of give in them.”

A moment passed. Donald was dried off by his waterman, then bound up and swaddled in luxurious soft towels. Then Natalie arrived to apply the ointment. When she’d left, Donald looked at Tater again, and said, “Women love them?”

“They do,” said Tater. “And once they knew of my power over women, I gained a great reputation amongst the good men of the earth —it turns out there are about two dozen or so of them —my master’s written them all down in a book, you know, those diaries that you get from stationers, and TK Maxx with a plastic padlock? And that explains how I was taken in by my god, who has a special interest in that sort of thing. He fucking loves the trade, you know.” He winked at Donald as he said the last bit, and said it in a sort of exaggerated version of his funny English accent.

“What’s he getting at?” thought Donald. “Is he beating me at this conversation? Does he know that I play 4-D chess with lower orders like him?”

“I’d kind of like to get back there if you were up for helping. I’m sure my master would reward you for your efforts.”

“Is that right?” said Donald, “If he knows the main God as well as me, I could do with him putting a call in for me, actually. But first, tell us more about that trade thing you mentioned. I’m great at doing deals, and I love women, too. It sounds like a great hobby. Do you want a Diet Coke by the way?”

Tater shook his head like he was some sort of shaman monk preparing for an enormous undertaking with a period of asceticism, though he really did it because it made him look tough, and Donald had already homed in on his weak spot —the slack gob, with its speech impediment and surfeit of saliva.

“Where I come from —the land surrounded by seas,” he said. He spoke slowly to tune the lisp down as far as it would go. “We lock up the women and trade them for gold.”

He noticed Donald’s expression, then added, “I could see, when your guards brought me up here, that you like a bit of bling yourself. And the old tomfoolery,” there was that accent again. Sort of Australian in a way, as if he was trying to project criminal.

Donald’s synapses started flashing like billy-o —criminals, and women, and gold. Gold central to it all. This had significance. This is what he had wished for, and God had heard his prayers. A sort of rusty stain akin to industrial waste began to leak from him into the fresh towels.

Tater went on, “This Mar-a-Lago is some gaff for a harem. You could keep them warm, and sell them on from here. Me and our kid could do it for you, we’ve got an app.”

Donald listened intently, nodding his heavy head, thick with the hair of someone else’s favourite horse. He was warming to this satyr. Quickly.

“I get gold for letting rooms to hoes, which are empty bar Mother’s Day weekend, and August? That’s what they used to call a no-brainer when I was a Prince living in Queens —this mug’s giving it to me on a plate,” he thought.

“Manage them with an asp!” he cried. “That’s a wonderful trick! Teach me your ways and we’ll make it stick!” trying his best to sound like he was in a fairytale, because Tater looked like he’d respond positively to that sort of thing.

When Tater didn’t reply, he pointed at him with his least worst hand, and said, “You are not a loser, like me.” Then he realised that he should have used a verbal exclamation mark —at least a full stop; he had meant to say, “You’re not a loser!” all forcefully and declarative. Then add, “Like me.” But the moment to correct it was lost now, so he added: “Obviously I meant what I said, because words just come out of me, whether I’ve thought of them or not. God puts them on my tongue because take after him, and he likes me. Likes me a lot actually.

I’m not a loser type of person, obviously, and you’re just the same, but not exactly the same, because there’s no one else like me. There’s no one who knows more about being like no one else, than me.”

Tater smiled a sly smile —the type that Donald had been trying to master as it goes, as he realised that he had the king weighed up.

Now sure that Donald would keep him safe until he could find his way back to the land surrounded by seas, he proposed a project to keep them busy ‘til that day arrived. He told Donald that he’d work with him to acquire the quantities of gold that he so coveted. “And perhaps we’ll knock off a few birds, on the way, eh?” he added.

Donald couldn’t help, his eyes widened, and the rusty pool in his towels expanded.

He didn’t know yet that satyrs always did that. They knew the true depth of their muse’s hunger; and Donald, he wasn’t insatiable, like many others Tater had met. He was different. Donald was a black hole of want that could never be filled.

Donald formally welcomed Tater to stay —at friends and family rates too. To be invoiced once Tater had started making money again, or if he were to be returned home, from where he could send some gold bars back by helicopter.

            “I thank you for your great kindness,” said Tater, “but I think you should come with me, and help yourself to the best of what we’ve got. My master would like it that way.”

            “Has your country got any important mineral deposits, or anything?” asked Donald. “We’re good at mining, we could maybe help you get them out and share them, or go mining on computers —we do that too, and with sticks of course, if they’re stuck.”

            “My master is a man of great riches, and can provide all earthly delights,” was all that Tater would say.

            He intrigued Donald. And he really did remind him of that odd thing in Homeland Security, or was it the FBI? With Tater there were the testicles, obviously —they really were a pair of beauties when you came to have a proper look at them. Those aside, though he bore so many similarities to the man whose name he couldn’t recall.

Of the two of them, Tater seemed far less likely to morph into a dangerous animal and suck your eyes out. Even though he actually was one. But you couldn’t say that they weren’t united by an oleaginous quality. And something unstated about their intentions. Mission, perhaps was a better word.

            When Natalie arrived with the Diet Coke and biscuits for their end of day one-on-one session, Donald asked her to make up the room next door to his, for Tater for the rest of his stay.

            “Hey Nat, you know that really creepy nasty guy in security?” he asked her, as she was leaving.

            “Which one?” she replied.

            “You know that greasy bald one,” he said.

            “The one whose eyes are always swiveling about as if he’s a Bot like they’re view-holes for his remote user?”

            “No,” said Donald, “The no-hair thing who got a computer program to draw him a wig that time. He’s got a sort of head that looks like it’s made out of a box…”

            Natalie shook her head.

            “Like he’s either about to flip out and murder someone; scared stiff you’re going to ask him what time it is.”

            “I’ve got it narrowed down to about six,” said Natalie, “South African?”

            “Six’ll do,” said Donald, “Do any of them remind you of Tater?”

            “Oh! The one who sacked all the environment inspectors? Yeah, a bit.”

            “Do you trust Tater?” asked Donald.

            “Compared with K-hole Bokx, too right. He only wants to go home, doesn’t he?”

            “Yeah, I suppose he does,” said Donald. “You don’t think he’ll stand between me and God, do you? You know, make up bad things I’ve done, and tell God about them?”

            “Closer to God, than you?” said Natalie laughing. “I don’t think so. I’ll print out some articles and put them in his room.”       

            The two new friends played happily together as they wound down the days to Tater’s departure. They spent ten whole days gossiping and sharing secrets. Some days Tater took Donald to the gym, but they never really got beyond eating breakfast in a jacuzzi. On another day, Donald returned the compliment, and took Tater for a day out at his golf course. Well, the patrons-only picnic area of the course, where they were brought enormous cheeseburgers like you see in the movies, on big paper plates.

            “I eat this with righteous indignation,” said Tater before tucking into the big juicy burger, careful to shove it into the side of his mouth with the slack opening.

            “I love the bible too” said Donald, but just in case the conversation went any further, he said, “I eat mine with ketchup, but I do sometimes get indigestion, especially if I don’t take enough Diet Coke with it.”

            “You gotta be careful, bro,” said Tater, “too much of that Diet Coke, and you might disappear. It does what it says on the tin, you know.”

            “I know,” said Donald. “I’m getting thinner on the inside with that, and the clack-valve operator,” which was the waterman’s official title, “but it’s all moving to the outside, instead of getting flushed out into the sewers. There’s no fairity in it, is there?”

            Tater agreed that there definitely wasn’t any sort of fairity in that, at all. “Is it worth putting yourself through it all?” he asked, “I mean, a minion down there, doing intimate work like that every day?”

            “That’s the point,” said Donald, laughing, he was a crazy kid this new friend, “I’m not going to deal with it, am I? It’s disgusting all that stuff.”

            “If that’s the case,” said Tater, “why don’t you try letting a woman do it, instead. It’s more their thing, and you know, you could make a fun game out of it.”

            Donald shook his head. “I like your angle kid, but we’ve got a project on, and he’s the man for it. He worked in nuclear, drilling the clinker out of missile tubes.”

            “A project?” Tater looked puzzled.

Donald told him about the gold nugget that had disappeared at his baby shower, and how his closest advisers, and religious mentors advised him that the only rational explanation for the missing nugget was that he had swallowed it as an innocent baby, and it had become lodged inside him.

“I’ve got to find it. It’s more than just gold, Tater, it’s bible gold. God gold. Think of the price of that!”

“You’re thinking of selling it?” asked Tater, “Or using it as proof of your divine origins?”

“Both!” said Donald, “As soon as that God stuff’s over, and it’s all proved, imagine what one of those tech pygmies would give me for it. Vladimir even. He’s secretly richer than all of them, and he loves God more than… me I suppose.”

He explained to Tater how they’d been stable mining, and how he was going to lay a golden egg. And how the clack-man had been helping with the prospecting.

            “You should have said, man,” said Tater.

            “Why?” asked Donald?

            “You see these plates,” said Tater, picking one up and throwing it like a Frisbee straight into the bin by the 18^th green —the one where Donald usually dropped all the spare balls he carried when he was playing. “If we were having this meal where I live, beautiful women would deliver these burgers to us on golden plates.”

            Donald’s jaw dropped. “You got that much gold?”

            “And then,” said Tater, “the most beautiful of them would be selected to take you back to your stink room to extract the golden egg with her fine and delicate fingers.”

            “I like it, and I want to talk more about this, but my man’s got a stick, with a light on the end,” he said. “And it’s got a switch.”

The Island of Secrets

On the eleventh day, Donald flew Tater back to his master on the plane that the United Federal Commonwealth of the North & East Pacific Territories had given him as a special gift for all the wars he solved —many of them before they’d even begun.

His staff had at first admired the ingenuity with which his benefactors had replicated Donald’s own personal aroma inside the main cabin, but after a while, the top notes of rancid offal, overpowered the beefy base tones that had so drawn them to the gift in the early days, and soon it became his second-best plane, to be used for guests only. Donald followed on the good plane.

They arrived at an island which was indeed surrounded by sea, as Donald observed on landing. It confirmed his instincts that Tater was a creature who spoke the truth. This really was the special kingdom which he had talked about —the home of the ancient deity Epsteinious.

“I was right to have trusted him,” said Donald to himself.

Tater remained at the airport until the second plan landed. He greeted Donald as he descended his plane, then went with him to the private cabins of his master, and keeper.

 “They look more like those caravans that nobody calls caravans just because they’ve got a wooden balcony on the front, like you get at Eurocamp sites in the South of France,” thought Donald, even though he’d never been, and just realising that he’d had another brilliant business idea. “And they’re not unlike my executive 7-star retreats at Mar-a-Lago, I suppose,” he said to himself. “Though theirs are purely an accident, built from what they found lying about on the island when they came here, whereas mine is business idea based on driving down costs by building from inadequate materials, making them look superficially attractive on the outside, and charging too much for them, by appending the name Donald, and calling them 7-star.”

Epsteinious sat in one of those wicker chairs hanging down from the ceiling that you can only get from charity shops, and props departments. As usual, he wore a silk dressing gown, reminding Donald of his old pal Hugh Hefner, and as he came closer to the demigod, he noticed that Epsteinious allowed his withered pecker to hang loose through the gap, just the way Hugh used to.

But whereas Hugh’s resembled a small pencil with a disproportionately long, chafed rubber on the end, Epsteinious’s looked more like one of those toys that are given to children when they are teething.

“You too?” asked Epsteinious.

“A thought conversation?” thought Donald, “Now the hanging chair makes sense —I love the movie vibe he gives off. This god-guy’s a bit special, like me, he thinks in moving pictures. And I like the way he can set the mood. I want someone to do that to my people for me.”

“Yes,” said Donald, he was going to add, “Far out,” but thought better of it, in case he gave away how impressed he was too soon.

But he did want to acknowledge that they were in a thought conversation with each other, so he said, “I guess you’ve done a lot of great work with close ups of vaginas and all that, whilst also advancing the cause of feminism?” So that he would see that Donald had noticed the Hugh Hefner tribute.

Epsteinious swallowed a laugh, and subvocalised, “Too right, pal.” Then he said, “You brought back my satyr! For this, I shall grant you your ultimate wish. You are a good and noble king; I can see that.” Though when he said it, it sounded more like nobbily, than noble because, demigod that he may be, he didn’t half mumble.

“What would you have me give you? What would your subjects want most? I can offer you a house made of white for you to remodel exactly as you like. Perhaps you’d like that? It can stand as a monument to your grace and innocence and it’d go quite well with all that civic bling you’ve got going on in your capital too. Give it a bit of a contrast, maybe.”

“People?” thought Donald. “In time maybe, once I get the God stuff established. And to convince them of that, I’m going to be needing a bit of gold. Birthright gold, that is.”

“My people need to see a successful king and leader. They feel safe in my success.”

“How would that work?” asked Epsteinious.

Donald began to tell the story of his birth, how it had been in a stable, and that kings from faraway had arrived a bit too late, and shouldn’t really appear on Christmas cards, but they’d brought gifts with them, that had been put in his cradle. “The thing is,” said Donald, “one of the gifts was a gold nugget. I can’t find it anywhere, and figure I must have swallowed it. I’ve had a clack man in for years, but we haven’t found it yet. My public would love me if I could lay a golden egg. It’d really convince them. Could we work on that, maybe?”

“Is that all?” asked Epsteinious.

“Well,” said Donald, “it would be even better if you could make everything I touch turn into pure gold!”

Epsteinious smirked. “If that’s all you want,” he said, “it’s already done.”

“But you haven’t done anything, or banged that gong or nothing,” said Donald.

“Chill,” said Epsteinious, “Me people have done it for me. Would you like a confirming email?”

Within moments, Natalie sent a WhatsApp to Donald, to confirm that a badly spelled email had just arrived.

Suddenly Donald wondered whether he should trust this thing, demigod, whatever he called himself. A god who can’t spell? What would be next? Monarchs that couldn’t read and write? No, Epsteinious was behaving more like a creep than a god to tell himself the truth, which he did. Perhaps he’d be better off if he ended their relationship now while it was at its peak, so that it was on the record, in case anything else went wrong in the future? Then perhaps just see him now and again, say like when it was half-day closing at Mar-a-Lago, and no one was about. That sort of thing? He held up his phone, and said, “What’s this?”

Epsteinious shrugged, “It’s me signature style so that my great rival gods’ AI-Bot warriors can’t understand a fucking word I’m saying,” he said.

“No, not that. My phone. It’s not turned to gold. Your deal is bullshit. I’ve been stiffed before it’s started. That’s not how it works. You’re supposed to default once I’ve gone back home and can’t do anything about it.”

“I told you to chill,” said Epsteinious. “The golden spell won’t work until you’ve left my kingdom. I had it set for tomorrow —I thought you were going to stay and play this evening. I’ll bring it forward, so it’s ready whenever you return home.”

“OK, that’s all right, then” said Donald, “I thought you were going to shaft me there for a minute.”

“No, but it puts me in the mood for shafting, now that you’ve put that thought in my head,” said Epsteinious.

“Man, he’s good,” thought Donald. “The chicks he must pull talking in that slinky Jason King, I know the future cos I’ve been there, style,” thought Donald. “I can’t decide whether to be jealous of him, or admire him.”

 Epsteinious clicked his fingers for Tater to come and take down his order for afternoon-T.

Donald couldn’t decide whether he just got fried in the 60s and was stuck there, or whether he was the greatest pussy magnet he’d ever met. He watched it all, open-mouthed, not daring to speak in case he missed some of the magic. He was a god all right. He looked like one of those men you used to see in aftershave adverts back in the day. He was everything, all at once. Mainly by hardly speaking.

Then, as soon as Tater approached, another message pinged on Donald’s phone and snapped him out of the trance. It was an ungrammatical text on Signal —and it wasn’t from Pete, or his wife!  Epsteinious winked at him. It was ready. The cosmic deal was struck.

He was preparing to launch himself up to his airplane’s steps when he heard Tater’s voice again.

“Happy with that?”

Donald nodded, “Yes, it seems to have worked out…”

“…as I said it would?” said Tater, ending the sentence for him.

Donald gave him the best version he could manage of his new smile.

A silence fell.

Tater drew out his skipping ropes, and started training on the spot, his enormous testicles hardly contained within his tight fight pants. He said nothing.

Donald turned to look at Tater from the steps of the plane.

Tater said nothing still, holding him in a cold glare.

“Like all great deals, we both got something out of it,” Donald tried.

Still Tater remained silent.

There was something menacing about the Satyr, he’d suspected that he had it in him, but he’d never seen this side of him before.

“Are you not happy to be home?” he tried.

Tater took a pace towards him and said, “Very…”

“I did thank you, didn’t I?” said Donald. “You see, I sometimes forget to tell people how much I value them.”

Tater shrugged.

“Can I tell you a secret, Tater?” said Donald.

Tater nodded.

Donald looked about him. “I don’t really know how to negotiate. What normally happens is that we all shout rude and unreasonable things at each other until one of us realises he’s rumbled. Would you care to have a go at that? It’s the only language I understand.”

Tater came within a few inches of Donald’s face and shouted, “I bailed you out, and all you’ve done is bring me home on something that felt like a flying abattoir. You’ve literally been given the golden touch. Where’s mine? And do yourself a favour, say it in your next sentence —you saw me skipping just then. You know what I can do.”

Donald drew in a breath then said, “If you ever come back to my country again, I’ll protect you and give you immunity for all the bad shit you’ve done over here while you’ve been looking after a very good friend of mine.”

“Alright,” said Tater, “that’ll do. See ya.” And he sped off on one of those skateboards that runs on batteries and is controlled by a TV remote in the pocket of your hoodie.

The Fallen Arches

King Donald flew home to Mar-a-Lago in triumph. And as soon as he landed, he tried a little experiment, and sure enough, he turned the object to gold. He went straight to the golf course where he would have a relaxing round of golf alone, so that he could plan how he was going to put his new powers into action.

For years, he had boasted of his golden touch on the greens —he could sink putts faster than young Pete could sink bottles of liquor, especially when no one was looking! He took out his favorite putter, but the moment his fingers brushed the grip it transformed into solid gold, turning so heavy it nearly broke his wrist, leaving him with heavy bruising on his tiny hands.

Worse was to come. Starving from his journey, he called for his favorite feast. The moment he touched the burger, it hardened into a heavy bar, the fries, stiff needles of iron pyrites; his Diet Coke, molten liquid gold that he dare not touch.

At last, he was surrounded by wealth, yet starving in a kingdom of useless metal. He sat at the edge of the putting green, alone in his cold golden cage.

Minutes passed. Was that a golden tear that lay on the apron to the putting green between his massive legs? Legs that looked even more like balloons in jogging pants from this angle. Don’t say his thighs had turned to gold when the tear bounced off them? He took off his golden golf shoes to rub his aching feet, and immediately felt the weight of his arches as they fell. Now he would have to swing his legs in wide circles just to be able to walk, like those gimpy dropouts on fentanyl you saw under the bridges in Washington, and those guys in his regular fourball at the Formidable Donald National Golf Club, Bedminster.

His gilded bone spurs were no longer the emblem of a knight errant, returned from adventures overseas, as he’d imagined them when he first tried out his new powers, now nothing more than odd-looking callouses that blended into the flat heavy feet of a golden Ozymandias.

In fact, they blended so well into this new body you’d hardly know he had them. This new body, now a horrible heavy orange and white temple to avarice. A body that no man would wish for.

The Gilded Companion

It was then that Natalie came out to meet him. She was holding a fresh stack of printed tweets on a tray. His old favourites. She began to read them to him, but not in the way she used to, the way he liked, like that girl out of the Little House on the Prairie, all nervous, but hopeful and innocent. Or was that The Waltons? No, the dark shadow of Tater tainted her.

He had run his conversion program on her. “All good pimps make their clients fall in love with them first,” he’d told Donald, and now those words echoed back at him, and for the first time he heard the lisping malevolence in them.

Tater had her under his spell. If Donald didn’t act, Natalie would be taken from him and put into slavery on Epsteinious’s Island and forced to serve lardy entitled fascists with ugly faces, and smelly neglected peckers. Men who’d never had their undercarriages power-washed!

“I’ll save you from that satyr!” he cried. But the moment his hand touched her shoulder, she froze. A stiff, metallic statue stood before him. He’d seen stiffs before —a few stiffies too, but this? Five and a half feet of pure gold! He felt an erection rising. “Entirely unmedicated!” he shouted. “It’s mine. I did it. I got my pecker working again, just like Hugh’s!” In his joy, dementia, and general lack of intellectual ability, particularly that of holding a thought in your mind whilst processing, albeit unchallenging, another, he entirely forgot for an instant about his golden touch. He was about to drop his pants, and if Natalie wasn’t up for it, if she could only hold that pose for a moment, he could take care of business himself. Then a thought struck him. As his erection reached its peak, he thought of Vladimir, and from there, golden showers, and at the last possible moment stopped himself from turning his favourite asset into a Golden Cock.

“One of us is enough,” he cried, abandoning Natalie where she stood to run off terrified into the wild lands beyond Mar-a-Lago, to find respite, and perhaps, in time, a cure.

The Call to Epsteinious

Donald texted the island, careful to use the stink room probe to dial the numbers. “Epsteinious, help me!” it said. “My feet are dead; my burgers inedible metal. I am starving!”

Inside his dark cave Epsteinious laughed. He messaged back. “Their is only won kwewer. U must go to the capitol n plunje your handz into the Washingdon Reflexion Pool. It will save Ur skin, but carefull cos what U wash off will leave ongoing forever enviro-mental disaster.”

Donald didn’t care. “As long as my burgers are juicy, I don’t care if the pool turns to rotten meat!” he shouted.

The Fêted State

King Donald ambled past the Lincoln Memorial, his swinging leaden walk, worse than it had ever been. Then, standing on the edge of the pool, allowed himself to topple into the water like a statue of a cancelled slave trader. The moment his mass broke the surface, so the curse broke. All that he’d touched turned back to what it once was. The heavy metal that had become his new clothes, melted away; his feet and hands returned to the little appendages flopping about at the end of his flabby limbs that he’d always know. He sat drying on the banks of the pool, slowly returning to the colossus of putrefying flesh to which he was used.

“It would be good,” he thought, “if I could get rid of these clothes, stained and soaked in human and environmental waste, as they are, and get someone to convince my subjects that I was wearing exquisite clothes, so fine that only the stable geniuses like the people in my court could see them.

That way, I could be hosed down by my waterman whenever I needed it, full colonic and all that —on Fifth Avenue if I needed to, where none of my adoring followers would say a word about it. I’m definitely going to do that on my next adventure.”

The curse had left his body, but it had not disappeared. The Reflecting Pool now transformed in his effluent to a stagnant chemical sludge. A blinding toxic glare shone from what was recently water.

“Who cares?” he said. “It still reflects, doesn’t it? It meets the contract. In fact, I’ve improved on it. It shines better now.”

“What do I care for the heavy metal pollution. No one cared about me, when I was weighed down with golden limbs. See how they like it.”

He pulled out his mobile and called Natalie.

            “Get me a Diet Pepsi, and a double bacon cheese XL whopper from Burger King,” he said.

            His request shocked her, “Nothing from the Golden Arches?” she asked.

            “There’s going to be some changes round here, Natalie,” he said. “Gold is for losers. From now on, the only things that matter are kings. Come over here to the Reflecting Pool, I want you to take a look at my new robe.”