The 45TH President of the United States and I Went Scuba Diving

Grant Gerald Miller

The 45^th President of the United States and I went scuba diving. We descended to the shallow ocean floor under a stream of bubbles. We crawled around on the ocean floor like toddlers. A jellyfish scooted by. A seahorse bobbed by. The 45^th President noticed the sea horse, and he reached his pointer finger out and touched it, and the seahorse burst into a star of black ink and dissolved into the ocean. The 45^th President touched a lump of corral, and it also exploded into black ink and dissolved. He exploded a half-crushed beer can. A floating limb of seaweed. He looked over at me and pointed at the ocean floor. I flailed and shook my head and mouthed NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. He reached down and touched the ocean floor and everything around us exploded into darkness. I floated there in the dark and waited for the 45^th President to swim over and touch me and turn me into a burst of black ink. The ink began to clear, but the president was gone. I looked down, and I saw a blue-green and black shifting abyss. I looked up and saw the same darkness. I wasn’t sure if I was looking up or down. I started swimming.

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Grant Gerald Miller was born in Memphis, Tennessee. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama and an assistant editor at Black Warrior Review. His work has appeared or is set to appear in various journals including Hobart, Entropy, Qu Magazine, Bartleby Snopes, Necessary Fiction, and Nimrod.