QUEEN MARILYN OF POPSLAVAKIA

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There was once a country called Popslavakia, where the rain fell in Technicolor and everybody was waiting for a bus that had been abolished by the Ministry of Transportation seventeen years earlier.

Nobody remembered exactly when this happened.

The government insisted the bus was merely late.

Queen Marilyn ruled Popslavakia from the passenger seat of a red Chevrolet convertible. She had blonde hair the color of American breakfast cereal and lips so red that the Communist Party accused them of being a foreign military installation.

She was a very nice queen.

Every morning she drove past the bus stop and waved to her subjects, who stood beneath a leaking shelter decorated with pictures of tomatoes and flowers.

The tomatoes were considerably happier than the people.

There was an old woman who had been waiting since Stalin was alive. She carried a cane and a handbag containing three boiled potatoes, a photograph of her husband, and a small piece of string that she believed connected her to God.

Beside her stood a punk girl whose hair resembled a pink explosion in a toothpaste factory.

She was waiting for the revolution.

The revolution was also late.

A young man wearing headphones sat on his suitcase, listening to a song about California. He had never been to California, but he imagined it as a place where the rain was warm and everybody owned a refrigerator full of oranges.

In Popslavakia, oranges were considered philosophical objects.

You could think about them, but you couldn’t have one.

The Queen was particularly fond of oranges.

She once declared an entire Tuesday in their honor.

It was the happiest Tuesday in the history of the republic, although no oranges were available for the celebration.

Behind the bus stop rose enormous buildings decorated with Marilyn’s face in yellow, pink, and blue. The government called this Socialist Pop Realism.

Marilyn called it wallpaper.

She didn’t particularly enjoy being queen. It had happened accidentally when somebody mistook her for a photograph and put her on a postage stamp.

The people began writing letters to her.

Most of them asked when the bus was coming.

One afternoon, while the rain was falling like a thousand broken television sets, Queen Marilyn stopped her Chevrolet beside the shelter.

“Where are you all going?” she asked.

Nobody answered.

They had been waiting so long that their destinations had become memories, and their memories had become countries, and those countries had disappeared from the maps.

The old woman finally spoke.

“We’re waiting for somewhere else.”

Marilyn thought about this.

It was the saddest thing she had ever heard, and she had once been married to a baseball player.

She opened the passenger door.

“Get in,” she said.

But there were hundreds of people and only one empty seat.

So Marilyn did something extraordinary.

She declared the Chevrolet a public transportation system.

The car didn’t get any bigger.

The people simply got smaller.

One by one they climbed inside, carrying their umbrellas, suitcases, potatoes, and unfinished revolutions.

Then Queen Marilyn drove west, toward a sunset that had been imported from California.

The bus arrived the following morning.

It was completely empty.

Nobody had anywhere left to go.