ORIGIN STORIES: Michele Bachmann

    Eight-year old Michele Bachmann had sense of only the vaguest association between life and hardship. Differentiating between her father Olaf’s turns of mood from sour to sourest was like differentiating between the white shades of the walls of the family’s Minnesotan ice-house. She had learned to tell without asking how many fish the river had yielded Olaf each day. If it were more than five, she would hear Putt-putt (the Minnesotan term for “father”) trudging happily around the side of the ice-house to the front entrance, knock the powder from his boots and sling the net from over his shoulder with one great merry motion as he entered, slapping the stunned fish upon the floor.
    “There!” he would bellow. “Today I have more than five fish!”
    On the days when Putt-putt had less than five (or less than zero on the miserable occasions he would accidentally drop the fish on his person into the river) little Michele would know because Olaf would burst through the northernmost wall of the ice-house perpendicular to the front entrance, shake the remnants of their home from his great shoulders, and charge through the southern wall like a bull lopsidedly yoked. Michele had subconsciously learned to follow the path of the useless Minnesotan sun; by day’s end she would be standing back flat to the West, prepared either to greet her happy father head on or at least avoid the path of his mysterious campaign. Her child’s intuition stopped here; she did not know where he went, only that he returned much later in the thirty-nine hour Minnesotan night smelling of spiced rum and would wake late and sullen in the next twenty-three hour Minnesotan day.
    Little Michele and Olaf lived very nearly alone. Her mother Ágærðr had run off long ago with another woman, after a lengthy and exhausting chase through waist-high drifts of snow. These marriage-ending lesbian night chases are an uncommon Minnesotan sight only in that there are few eyes to see them. But they do happen nightly under the silent omniscience of the Aurora Borealis, and sadly the lesbians, clutching each other’s mittens over the banks of snow, nearly always get away. Ágærðr had left one parting gift for the infant Michele: a pony, procured, we must conclude, by her new lover and accepted reluctantly by Olaf as a childhood companion for his daughter. She was permitted to name the pony Ágærðr only because of the double purpose the name served: a tribute in her eyes to the Mutt-mutt she never knew, a degradation in his eyes to the woman he neither did.
    As the years wore on Ágærðr began to bear more and more of Olaf’s frustration. What started in daylight as sardonic epithets issued with some humor (a simple stubbed toe or reindeer bite would conjure a vapor-shrouded invective for the new Ms. Ágærðr) would become more darkly and drunkenly earnest by nightfall. (It must be noted here that most Minnesotans live and die alone and must each personally invent the concept of sarcasm if they are ever to use it, which is only achieved under the most extreme psychological conditions.) But little Michele and Ágærðr remained close. On one occasion Michele lost track of the time and found herself making snow-faeries in the center of the ice-house by the end of the day. She froze in terror as she heard the steps of her father’s furious juggernaut seconds away from trampling her spread-eagle, sparrowish little frame. But only a dull thud was heard, followed by Olaf’s familiar cursing. She ventured outside to find that Ágærðr had intercepted his path to the Northern wall, and both father and pony lay in the snow making an obscene ungulate snow-faerie of their own.
    Michele was awoken somewhere in the thirty-third hour of one night having only managed to sleep in the twenty-ninth, her little hands numb from the evening’s lonely wall rebuildings. She heard a disturbing caterwaul making ungodly harmonies with the howling wind. Her father was returning. He was drunk, singing, and fishless.
    By the time Michele located her father by the river under the eerie green glow of the Northern Lights, his songs had given way to bitter charges and threats directed towards his wife’s hoofed namesake, who stood sadly and mildly in the snow, offering little in the way of recrimination.
    “Lazy! Lazy! Lazy lady lazy lady lazy ladzies ladezily!” he screamed. “Lazy lezby ladies!”
    Ágærðr snuffed and stepped once a back foot.
    “Lazy!” he continued madly. “No more! You take my fish no more, now you fish. Get up!” he shrieked: “Get up! Get up on your feet! Fish! Fish!”
    “Putt-putt, no!” Michele cried. Olaf had crossed behind Ágærðr and was applying his shoulder with uncustomarily little success against her powerful buttock towards the black banks of the river. He quickly abandoned this approach and began flogging the pony with his now customarily empty fishing net.
    “Get up! Get up on your feet, woman! Fish! You fish!”
    Michele seized her father by one of his slabs of leg. “Putt-putt! She can’t! She is but my sweet pone-pone!” she sobbed, using the Minnesotan word for “pony”. With a crazed shout and a heave of his leg, Olaf tossed Michele on her back where she lay crying.
    Ágærðr turned her head and looked sadly at Michele. “Stand up! On your feet!” Olaf screamed. Ágærðr bowed her head and closed her dark eyes. “Get up! Get up and fish, woman!” The pony sighed, stomped her front hoofs, leaned back on her haunches, and screamed.
    Olaf clamped his mouth shut and dropped the net. Michele gathered herself up in the banks like a hasty snowcastle and pulled her terrified knees to her chest. The pony screamed. And began to rise.
    “Eeeeeaaaaaauugggghhhhh” Ágærðr screamed, sitting now like a massive and horrible frog. From deep within her thick and tearing muscles came sounds like the artillery of a submarine as her vertebrae were snapping and popping one by one by one by one by one. Michele’s eyes grew wide.
    Ágærðr stood straight before them, a ghastly and perverse silhouette. She looked once from Olaf to Michele and staggered horribly towards the river. Her painful screams and snorts grew faint as the gangly spectacle stopped at the banks. Father and daughter watched as Ágærðr braced herself and attempted to re-bend. She lost her footing and toppled like a lightning-struck pine headfirst into the river and drowned.
    Olaf was mad the rest of his days. Michele went on to become a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, a post she has held since 2007. The district includes several of the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities, such as Woodbury, and Blaine as well as Stillwater and St. Cloud. However the look in her eyes and her opinion of homosexuals has been frozen solid in her skull since that night.

By Bryan Condon