By Jon Wesick
The smell of reused, vegetable oil made Uncle Sam’s mouth water as he examined the backlit menu above the brushed-steel counter. When the cashier in the multicolored baseball cap motioned, Uncle Sam stepped forward.
“I’ll have a cheeseburger, fries, and root beer.”
“That’ll be $6.25.”
The harsh overhead lights exposed the acne the cashier had tried to cover with over-the-counter zit cream.
Uncle Sam reached into his striped trousers, found his wallet empty, and whispered, “May I see your manager?”
The assistant manager approached the customer in the star-spangled suit, fingering his sparse mustache, something he did when annoyed. He needed to shut this down quickly so he could return to his office and complete his algebra homework.
“Help you?”
“Listen, that $3 trillion war to eliminate those nonexistent nukes left me a little short, so,” Uncle Sam removed a yellowed parchment from his lapel pocket and unfolded it, its handwritten words flaking from the surface and falling to the linoleum floor, “so, how about I trade you for this?”
The assistant manager squinted at the document. Even a first-year, community-college student knew you don’t spell Congress with fs.
“It’s the last copy of the Bill of Rights,” Uncle Sam said. “Freedom of speech and religion, your right to protest and to a fair trial—I’ll give up all of that for just one of your tasty burgers. Hell, I’ll even throw in a woman’s right to control her own body. I sure do love those burgers—the juicy meat, golden cheese, and tart pickle!”
The assistant manager told the cashier to give Uncle Sam what he wanted and slipped the Bill of Rights into a FedEx envelope addressed to corporate. They’d surely reward him by taking him on full-time or maybe even promoting him to manager.
Uncle Sam carried his meal to a fiberglass table. In his eyes, the rights that soldiers died protecting were not even worth lobster or steak Delmonico but only a gray hockey-puck of previously frozen meat topped with processed cheese, “secret sauce,” and wilted lettuce, all on a stale bun.
When the assistant manager heard the last slug of soda burble through Uncle Sam’s straw, he approached with a proposition.
“Care for dessert? How about sweet apple filling wrapped in a tender, golden-brown crust? I’ll give it to you for the low, low price of your schools, libraries, and the codes to your nuclear weapons.”
Jon Wesick is an editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem, “Bread and Circuses,” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom , a short story collection, The Alchemist’s Grandson Changes His Name, and several novels. Visit his website at jonwesick.com.
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