This has been a tale from an alternate universe. In that world, Hillary did not win and Donald did not win.

Disaffected liberals distanced themselves from Hillary after the Wiki-leaked emails told what her people did to Bernie. Disaffected Christians stuck to their guns over Trump’s immorality. It was like our universe, with a single difference. Leap’s non-candidacy had caught fire and provided an alternative which vast numbers accepted..

Donald Trump denounced him. He said that if Leap claimed to be sixteen years old, that made him too young to be President. Hillary kept her mouth shut; it was one thing she could do better than Trump

Things got out of hand. On November eighth, after a massive write-in campaign by people who surely didn’t really expect to succeed, Leap Alan Hed was voted in as the forty-fifth president of the United States.

Oh, well. Could he be any worse? The people of his alternate universe may never know.

Leap read the election results at a news stand and his heart all but stopped. Then he ran.

It is said that anyone who wants to be President is automatically disqualified by reason of insanity. Maybe; if so Leap was the sanest man in America, because he really didn’t want it. He considered trying for asylum in another country. He thought about Switzerland, but he gets a nosebleed in an elevator. He thought about Russia, but the last thing he needed was to be caught up in that tug-of-war. He considered Great Britain, but he had once lived in California and the thought of all that rain dissuaded him.

He decided to just disappear, and he did. I don’t know where he went; he didn’t tell me. Geraldo claimed to know, but that turned out to be a bluff. Somebody said they saw him heading north, following a compass, but everybody knows you can’t walk to the North Pole now that the ice caps have melted. He was probably looking for a Fortress of Solitude, and you can’t blame him.

All those people who voted for Leap are now wringing their hands and wondering what is going to happen next. Every one of them thought they were the only one who would write him in. They never thought he would win. They certainly never thought he would run to Canada like a modern day draft dodger. Which, essentially, is what he is — drafted to be President, and scared out of his wits.

Hillary has been very quiet about it all. She hopes to win in the House if they can find Leap and get him to resign. But it’s problematical. There are only fourteen Democrats and eleven Republicans in the new Congressional class. Aside from a few Libs and Greenies, the rest are all newly elected Independents, sent by a disgusted America. Bernie is smiling about that.

Donald claims he will still win, and when he does, he plans to invade Canada to bring back that traitor Leap. I think he just might.

We’ll have to leave their alternate universe now, worried sick and talking to each other about the kind of changes one man can make — even if he doesn’t want to. We have to get back to our own universe. We have problems of our own.

finis