The Gallows Girls
By TJ Geezer

A TV interview – how kewl! Red’s our favorite color, what else do you need to know? 

Really?! Okay, here’s what happened. Me and Katie – she’s my twin, I’m Karlie – we were stuck in a public high school since the ‘rents didn’t have the smarts to use vouchers for hauling in money and home-schooling us. You’re supposed to make money off of disasters, the best president always says.

Hey, don’t blame us. Anybody can make money off disasters except losers, he says. Public school’s got to be one of the biggest disasters ever and our ‘rents didn’t even make a dime. They’re losers.

But not us. Katie and Karlie, we’re smart! I mean, so very smart, everybody knows it. And we’re really good looking too, beautiful in fact, soooo beautiful. Just ask Miss Jenkiner, our PE teacher. She gave us both A’s just because we let her grab our – what? Oh shut up, Katie, you know it’s true. And if the best president did it, there wasn’t anything wrong with it so just shut up. 

Anyway, we had to figure out a way to make a lot of money from some disaster or be losers so I wrote to the best president to ask if it had to be a really big disaster, like when those losers in Pakistan or somewhere nuked Wall Street just after he sold short all those New York mortgage companies, or if it could be smaller, like a strictly personal disaster. 

I guess he was too busy to answer but I thought, well, all those other rich people say to start small and build from there, okay? And it’s a lot easier to find personal disasters when you’re just starting out, because there are so many of those compared to really big ones like earthquakes and big ol’ acts of – who does terrorism this year? Muslims, right? – yeah, Katie, I know, but Commanism was a long time ago and the lib’rals almost don’t exist anymore, so it’s Muslims now I think – anyway, those disasters are too big for us to make money off of yet.

Okay, it would be personal disasters then. And here’s where Winner’s Luck comes in – it was right about then that the best president said terrorists and Muslims and other people like that ought to be hanged publicly so their friends can see and take a lesson from it. He said hiding executions didn’t make any sense if you’re trying to set examples for people. It’s obvious, yeah?

So all the states, starting with the usual leader places down in the south, started doing public hangings in the middle of towns and cities where people needed to learn lessons – I don’t know how they decided where to have the hangings since the authorities kept saying it had nothing to do with racism, but it’s amazing how many more people with dark skin do terroristy stuff than people like me and Katie, in fact I don’t think I ever saw anyone with blonde hair and blue eyes being hanged ever but that doesn’t matter since the point is to teach people lessons, everybody knows that, okay?

Anyhow, getting hanged is the worst kind of personal disaster, right? I can’t think of anything worse or more personal unless it’s, like, having an airplane dump its rest room toilet tanks on your head from 35,000 feet or something. Hanging’s a real personal disaster and plus, it’s on a schedule (every Saturday in the square, and everybody knows about it) unlike airplane crapsicle dumps or lightning strikes or stuff like that.

So we were definitely in the right place at the right time, which is Winners Luck if we could just figure out how to make money from it. We couldn’t invest in private prison gibbet manufacturing like the best president did before his “hangings ought to be public” speech, since our loser ‘rents never gave us much more than lunch money and we saved that up for buying stuff on the weekend, don’t tell Mom. Hey, we didn’t want to get fat eating lunches, okay? It wasn’t stealing.

So there we were, watching as all those states started hanging terrorists in the public squares and respectable families would bring their kids to watch and laugh and even have picnics if there was still grass to sit on with all the underground water owned by Nestle now. See? All those people gathered every Saturday for the hangings, just to prove they had healthy family values and to enjoy the company and the spectacle and stuff.  I’ve even seen dark-skinned people there, watching and laughing instead of being in the starring disaster roles, so to speak. 

We had everything we needed - crowds of nice, healthy people and families and stuff, and bigshots up for elections wandering around proving they can be Regular People and offering to pay for votes and stuff, all very traditional. We thought about going and picking people’s pockets when the Moment of Disaster came for some loser slob, but a friend on the football team tried that and they hanged him the next weekend. He had kind of Italian-looking skin so he didn’t really count as not dark-skinned, I guess, or maybe it really doesn’t have anything to do with how light respectable people seem to be.

So picking pockets was out, we weren’t there to get hanged. That’s when Katie had the Big Winner Idea – we already knew how to make people watch us by being cheerleaders at our school’s football games. It’s hard work being cheerleaders but you learn a lot of dancing chops, as a former pretty good president learned at Yale, somebody told me. So we practiced up, and learned a few songs, and picked up some Euro dance music for the sound system, and that’s how we got to be Katie and Karlie, The Gallows Girls, making lotsa money at public hangings all over. 

Oops – we’re on next. Enjoy the hanging!