On a Sunday in October, 1906, an emergency telegram arrived at the White House announcing that President Theodore Roosevelt had been mauled and devoured by a lion while he was on a big game hunting safari in Africa. He was dead. Vice President Charles W. Fairbanks was on a bender and could not be located to take the oath of office. As it happened, both the Speaker of the House and the President Pro Tempore of the Senate were on the same bender, so the White House staff began to improvise. They went into the street and grabbed a tourist named Gareth Blastencradle, a baker visiting from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, with his wife Sarah. After explaining the situation to him and drafting the only Supreme Court Justice in town that weekend, they administered a slightly revised version of the oath in a secret ceremony, and Blastencradle became the 26th-and-a-half President of the United States, an office he was to hold for less than an hour.

President Blastencradle’s first and only official duty was to sign the Righteous Reclamation Act. This piece of legislation attempted to deal with the garbage strikes that had crippled most of the big cities in the nation. The new law established that if a pile of garbage was under a certain size, it would be collected by a team of Girl Scouts pressed into service and protected by National Guardsmen. Once a pile of garbage exceeded that limit, it was declared a federally protected wetland and could not be touched, not even by a Girl Scout.

While the clandestine signing ceremony was underway, an artist named Hendrick Van Allen was brought in to paint the new President’s portrait. He was the best they could find on such short notice, but he had no experience in drawing people, being strictly a wildlife artist. He was allowed to paint the President as a turkey vulture with a disturbingly human face, descending on its prey, claws outstretched, beak open in a fierce shriek. Needless to say, this extraordinary work was never displayed in the White House or anywhere else.

Within the hour, another emergency telegram arrived at the White House. This one stated that Teddy Roosevelt had been mauled by a hyena, not a lion, and only partially devoured, though the result had still been fatal. However, a quick-thinking native bearer had summoned a local witch doctor, who resurrected the President with a terrifying voodoo rite. It was this magically reconstituted version of Roosevelt that returned to the States and made his most notable achievements, such as establishing the national parks.

Meanwhile the White House Chief of Staff brusquely told Blastencradle that he was now the president of nothing and had two Secret Service agents throw him and his wife back into the street. They cut short their trip to Washington, D.C., and returned to Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Blastencradle changed the name of his shop from Blastencradle’s Bakery to the Oval Office Bakery. He refused to write normal frosting messages on cakes such as “Happy Birthday” or “Happy Anniversary.” All he would write now was “President Blastencradle” or “Hail To The Chief.” Naturally, business began to drop off. In two years he was ruined. The bakery closed and was repossessed by creditors. Sarah divorced Gareth and moved away, taking their two children with her.

Blastencradle wandered the streets of Eau Claire, a homeless wraith dressed like Teddy Roosevelt on safari, except for the voodoo paint on his face. He subsisted on day-old bread pulled from the dumpster behind his former shop. On Christmas Eve, 1908, he was found frozen to death on the steps of the town hall. He was buried in a pauper’s field on the edge of town. Some anonymous benefactor—many believe Roosevelt himself—paid for a stone which read, “Here Lies Gareth Blastencradle, The Best President These United States Never Had. Hail To The Chief.”

Kurt Luchs

won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are published by Sagging Meniscus Press, which will also be issuing his latest full-length poetry collection in 2024, Death Row Row Row Your Boat. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Homunculus, poem by Kurt Luchs in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 12, March 2022)

⚡ Lives of the Gods, prose poem by Luchs in MacQ (Issue 7, March 2021)