By Dale Bell

SGA OFFICE—In a stunning discovery, B&S reporters have confirmed that self-gov in Grinnell is not, in fact, dead, and that the Student Government Association has just been locked in their office all year. 

This discovery was made after B&S staffers reported a smell emanating from behind the door of the SGA office “like the Grinnsmell had shit itself and then died.” Eager to find the source of the stench, the B&S used its state-of-the-art-intern-who-is-on-the-football-team to knock down the door to the SGA office.

After breaching the door, eyewitnesses describe seeing a dimly-lit office caked in filth, with discarded off-brand fruit snack wrappers and gnawed bones covering the floor. A tattered banner hung in the back of the office with “Happy Inauguration Day” written across it. A long table sat in the center of the room, covered with tally marks and other etchings. At the far end of the table rested a hunched figure, dressed in a shredded quarter-zip, muttering wildly:

“Quorum, we have a quorum, a quorum of one… no. No no no. Not one, many. Thank you for reminding me, Ms. Vice President,” the figure said, gesturing an almost skeletal hand to a mop placed in the chair beside him. “I could never forget about you. You gave so much to this government… your expertise, unparalleled in our decision to bring branded napkins back to DHall, and your flesh, your flesh… so tender… No! No! Don’t remember. Can’t remember… the docket. Mr. Treasurer, what do we have today?” 

The figure nodded solemnly toward a toothless skull placed beside a whiteboard, upon which the words Let us out had been scrawled in what experts later confirmed to be a mix of bile, urine, blood, and possibly mustard.

Upon seeing the B&S reporters, the figure shrank back.

“Anne!” they cried, “Have you returned for us after all this time? Is our term at an end?” The figure squeezed its hands together. “May we talk, Anne, President to President? When you closed that door you said you would be right back… just getting napkins… have you brought the napkins, Anne?”

After the B&S reporters introduced themselves, the figure sat back in their chair.

“Should we believe them, Senator?” they asked the mug seated across from them, staring fixedly at its googly eyes. “They say they have names. I had a name once… before we ate the p-cards. A major too… We thought it was a mistake at first. When the door locked. How we laughed. But then the laughing stopped. We cried for help. We sent emails to the student body asking… begging for aid, sure that someone would read them. But no. No one did. No one came. Thousands of emails deleted without reading. Not even the TLDRs… and so we governed alone in this darkness. We governed until, one by one, the others could not anymore.”

Something moved amongst a pile of papers. The figure tensed before leaping from their chair over the table, hands plunging into a pile of discarded constitutions, and extracting a writhing rat. 

“AHA!” yelled the figure. “OFFICERS OF THE GOVERNMENT. I PROPOSE A MOTION TO FEAST!”

The figure, now standing amid the wreckage of snack wrappers and chewed syllabi, raised the wriggling rat high above their head.

“A motion has been raised. All in favor?”

 

The mug remained silent.

The mop rolled taciturnly.

The toothless skull offered no objection.

 

“THE AYES HAVE IT.”

 

Crack.