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$DIS

next week on
"the bachelor"

by Miracle Jones

Every time a rooster in the pit screeched as a razor split its face or ripped open a tendon in its leg, Chris Harrison, host of television’s “The Bachelor” and also “The Bachelorette,” felt a wave of relaxation pass through his shoulders, sloughing off another layer of deep tissue tension.

His whole body was an onion made of frustration and disappointment, and the vicious cockfight in the basement of this North Dallas Dairy Queen was the only thing that could peel away the layers of anxiety enveloping him right now. Even though his rooster, “Rose Ceremony,” was pinned into a corner and bleeding to death, it was all worth it.

“Your rooster is gonna lose,” said Ashford Luis Levy, also known as “Dip,” on account of the large wad of dip always tucked inside his lower lip.

Ashford Luis Levy spat into the dust, away from the fighting roosters, while Chris Harrison leaned far over the side of the pit, stretching out the arms of the green silk shirt that fit him like mold on a peach.

“Come on goddammit,” seethed Chris Harrison. “Don’t worry about your eyes, Rose Ceremony. You don’t need your eyes. Feel the fight.”

He felt alive. Gloriously alive.

“Your rooster is gonna die today,” said Ashford Luis Levy. “I tried to buy him, but you wanted to make some kind of point, and now your rooster...your beloved Rose Ceremony...is gonna die.”

Chris Harrison had raised the pit rooster from birth. He had spent thousands of cash dollars breeding him, training him, and building the reputation for this monthly fight in this run-down North Dallas Dairy Queen so that he would have a place to show him off. The razors attached to the rooster's talons were from Chris Harrison's own shaving kit, a birthday present from his first wife.

This wasn’t his town. He was from Dallas, but he didn’t live in Dallas anymore. He suspected that Ashford Luis Levy had drugged his rooster somehow before the fight. There was no excuse for Rose Ceremony to be so sluggish, but it didn’t matter: the thrill of it all was healing him.

Chris Harrison’s phone rang. Not his regular phone. Not his sleek ergonomic smart phone, black and cold like a shard of obsidian from a dormant volcano. It was his Disney phone that rang. The pink, rhinestone encrusted phone that served as a direct line between him and the House of Mouse.

The Disney phone played “When You Wish Upon a Star” at full volume as it vibrated. There was no way to turn it off, except by answering it.

Chris Harrison answered the phone automatically, his eyes never leaving the violent thrashing that his rooster was receiving in the pit.

“Yes,” said Chris Harrison.

It was Judy Pickering, the head writer of the Bachelor. Chris Harrison had never wanted to be a television celebrity: he had wanted to be an athlete. Once upon a time, when he was on his soccer scholarship at SMU and studying broadcast journalism, he thought he might like to work for the government.  Maybe the CIA or maybe the FBI. Now he worked for Disney in LA and so he was in a pit watching roosters kill each other so that he could feel normal again.

“He’s gone cad,” said Judy.

“Cad” was the term that Disney gave to any Bachelor or Bachelorette who went rogue and actually started fucking the contestants when the cameras were off, not wanting to wait for the three chances in the fantasy suites that Disney would provide at the end of each season.

Technically, this wasn’t against any of the rules. Technically, there weren’t any rules. Disney was merely trying to help a man with a 90% human likability index or higher “meet his wife” by presenting him with twenty-five willing young ladies and letting this man test them, torture them, and eliminate them one by one until he was ready to propose. 

But cads had to be managed. They needed extra guidance.

“He pressed all the buttons on the elevator on the way to dinner at the top of the Space Needle and convinced Jennifer K. to blow him between floors. She was sobbing about it during her confessional because he didn’t even give her the rose. Can you believe that horseshit? She blows him in an elevator, presumably consensually as far as we can tell, and he won’t give her the rose. We actually took him in the back and explained how this was gonna look. He didn’t care. He was quite pleased with himself. He knows we will edit it all out.”

“I really hate this guy.”

“Disney says the people will love him.”

“Which one is Jennifer K. again?”

“She’s teaches preschool to special needs children.”

“Right,” said Chris Harrison.  “How does she test?”

“She’s got a likability index of about 60%. Everyone knows she won’t make it in the end, but she is sort of beloved on account of her weird haircut.”

“Right,” said Chris Harrison. “The one with the weird asymmetrical bangs.”

“Anyway, we sent her home. But this is like the fifth time in two weeks. It is chaos here. We could have a walkout.”

“I will be there by morning,” said Chris Harrison. 

Rose Ceremony was cowering in the corner, protecting his eyes while Ashford Luis Levy’s trim bantam slashed him and strutted around him in a circle. Chris Harrison stepped into the pit. 

The crowd gasped. 

He separated the roosters by kicking dirt at them and then brought the hard heel of his cowboy boot down on his once-beloved, now-blind rooster, crushing his cracker-thin skull as “Dip” laughed and clapped and cursed them both and said terrible things about Chris Harrison’s parents.


***


The woman next to him on the plane recognized him. She asked him for details and gossip about the current season, but of course he couldn't say anything. Finally, she outright asked him how much people got paid to be on the Bachelor.

“Ma’m, I get this question all the time. What you really want to know is if we set anything up, or if any of the girls are plants, or if the whole thing is staged. The truth, the absolute truth, is that everything we do is real.  It’s the most gratifying job in the world. I can’t believe my luck. We help people find true love. It doesn’t always work out, but we try, don’t we? You have to believe in the process.”

The woman sighed and tried to hint that her own marriage was on the rocks. Chris Harrison got up to use the bathroom, talked to the flight attendant, got his seat reassigned to one in the back, and instantly fell into a sleep so deep, so dreamless, and so dark that it was like having his mind scooped out and replaced with a wool sweater.


***


“How are the apologae of our furies?” asked Chris Harrison, pouring himself a cup of coffee at the Bachelor command center, the trailer by the craft services table where the five camera teams reconvened each evening to discuss each day’s conflicts and events and to make suggestions for how their individual strands could be weaved together by the expert editors waiting in air-conditioned rooms in the Magic Kingdom. 

Chris Harrison had handpicked each of these camera crews, selecting the sort of silent, angry punks that he had admired and feared when he was a dumb bright-eyed jock in his early twenties. Many of them had terrible drug problems. 

“The narrative is tight,” said a green haired woman named Madge. She was wearing a t-shirt that said “Childsafe” across the chest. “The narrative is beast.”

“What is ‘Childsafe?’” asked Chris Harrison.

“Oh, it’s this non-profit,” said Madge.

“Everyone in your generation works for some kind of non-profit,” said Chris Harrison. “That’s America’s future, isn’t it? Non-profit.”

The narrative was the all-important driving force behind each season of the Bachelor. They weren’t making a television show here: they were making romance novels. Each season was passionate intrigue forged by the crucible of market forces, manipulated by scarcity, guided by the economics of scale, and crafted by rational choice operations. Love as capitalism. Love as Chicago School economics. Each season had a natural momentum with a beginning, middle, and end, with clear Joseph Campbell-style thresholds, heroes, and villains. 

But whereas romance novels ended, each season of the Bachelor was an ongoing property that lived a staggering life beyond the confines of each formal consummation. Each successful relationship that the series produced was a testament to the precision of the process. Each broken dream was a devastating tragedy that confirmed the worst about love, men, relationships, and television, and made the audience even more enraptured with the series, indebted to its dark truths.

If god is love, then “The Bachelor” was a show about the journey to find god.

The talkies killed the silent films, thought Chris Harrison, remembering his own childhood and the drive-in movie-theater in Jacksboro, Texas where the sound for the picture came from the radio in your car. The narrative possibilities of movies with real speech were undeniable. But our realies are even stronger than those talkies, he told himself. There are real moments within the confines of the fake structures we build. Nowadays, to sell narrative, not only must it be a movie, not only must it be a talkie, it’s also got to be a realie. There's no other way to reach people. And yet, any time you made an artificial structure, you called people to you who knew just how to exploit it.

"There’s this girl named Jennifer P. who is outstanding," said Madge. "We had three Jennifers, actually, but he ditched the other two already. Jennifer P. works in a beauty shop. And get this: she went to school with him, and HE DOESN’T REMEMBER HER, even though she has had a crush on him for like twenty years. He keeps saying she looks so familiar. She keeps breaking down in private. It is totally legit pain and human suffering.”

Chris Harrison knocked back the dregs of his coffee. It was just like he liked it: as black and thick and greasy as bacon breakfast dishwater.

“So is he really fucking all of them?” asked Chris Harrison.  “Every chance he gets?”

“Oh totes,” said Madge. “He is cad to the max.”

“How come this is the first I’ve heard of it?” asked Chris Harrison. 

“Well, it is only week three,” said Madge. 

“Tell me something,” asked Chris Harrison. “Has he advanced any of the women whose honor he has sullied?  Has he given out a single rose to any lady he has debauched and contaminated?”

Madge thought about it, running her long fingers through her viridescent hair.

“Wow,” she said. “I guess not. Wow, this dude is totally dark.”

Chris Harrison tightened his skinny necktie, getting himself psychologically ready to drop another date card. Be cool, Chris Harrison, he told himself. It is just like a penalty kick. Don’t think about scoring. Think about maintaining control of the ball after the kick. Think about what happens next.

“He’s a cad, we’ll handle it, the Disney people will put on the pressure, everything will work out.”

“It always does,” said Madge.

Chris Harrison thought about an article he had read about Jimmy Savile. There was a logic to the way pedophiles selected their victims. They worked their way into positions of power where they had access to a large group of trusting children. They were patient. They became priests, football coaches, guidance counselors, casting directors, and politicians. They started with light touching. They saw which children tattled and which parents reacted. They narrowed down their selection. They moved into more heavy wrestling and touching. Some parents were so oblivious that even if their kids complained they did nothing. Some of the children were so trusting and lonely that they seemed numb. They couldn’t handle the feelings. The sad, smart ones were the best. You could get them on your side. The predators narrowed down their victim pool to find someone completely malleable and completely unprotected. 


***


Chris Harrison could see through the window of the mansion that this season’s Bachelor was hunched over a table on a leather loveseat, naked to his waist, sweating from the cocaine and whiskey in his blood, playing Tetris at full volume and screaming at the massive flat screen television every time one of his blocks went awry.

“COME ON,” he shouted, throwing his head back. “THIS GAME CHEATS.”

The windows of his Bachelor mansion rattled every time a line of blocks disappeared.

Knocking wasn’t working, so Chris Harrison used the silver door key that Disney had provided him with just in case a Bachelor was so hungover he couldn’t make it to a photo shoot or a charity luncheon and needed to be dragged bodily to a limousine.

Chris Harrison walked across the room and pulled the plug on the television.

The Bachelor stared at Chris Harrison with big sad eyes.

“I was doing better than I ever did,” said the Bachelor coldly. 

“We need to talk,” said Chris Harrison. “You can play later.”

“Okay,” said the Bachelor. “It’s cool, it’s cool. What’s up?”

Chris Harrison tried to size the Bachelor up, trying to get some kind of sense of the best way to proceed.

“You want any coke?” asked the Bachelor, suddenly nervous. 

“No thanks,” said Chris Harrison. 

“Cool,” said the Bachelor. 

“There is such a thing as too much cocaine,” suggested Chris Harrison, looking around the Bachelor’s “pad.”

“Man, dude, when people are giving you free cocaine to fuck girls on TV in front of their parents and all of America, you should probably do that free cocaine and fuck those girls. I mean, someday I will be in an old folk’s home and people will be telling stories about how they killed Arabs in Iraq and stuff and then it will be my turn to tell a story and I better have some good ones.”

“Like the time you did so much coke and played Tetris so loudly that your septum shattered in your nose like a crème brulee?”

“Whatever,” said the Bachelor.

“Listen,” said Chris Harrison. “I am getting word from my camera teams that you are only sending the women home that agree to have sex with you. That is not a good situation.”

“Yeah, so what?” asked the Bachelor. “The camera people are fucking some of these ladies, too. I’m not ratting on them. Oh dang, does Disney want to leak a sex tape or something?”

“Never mind about Disney,” said Chris Harrison. “I need to know if this is gonna keep happening. Is this what your season is going to be all about?”

The Bachelor was silent. His eyebrows cramped together in the center of his face. He looked confused.

“Maybe,” said the Bachelor.

“You aren't taking this journey seriously,” said Chris Harrison, with equal parts sarcasm and menace. 

“Sure I am, man,” said the Bachelor.  “I want to find my wife out there! I just want to make sure that I don’t miss out on fucking somebody who will fuck me for basically no reason while I whittle all the ladies down to one really, really special person. ”

“They will turn on you,” said Chris Harrison. "I've seen it before."

“Come on!” said the Bachelor. “So I am playing a little GTA in your Sim City. So what? My journey is real. I am looking for a wife here. I need to see these ladies inside out, from every possible angle.”

Chris Harrison got up off the couch. He didn’t even make it to the door before Tetris blocks began to fall again, making his teeth rattle, making birds fly out of the single tree in the center of the perfectly manicured front lawn.


***


“I need you to find out everything you can about his early life,” said Chris Harrison to Madge, sipping his goth black coffee. “We are going deep. I hate doing this, but I want everything.  Dental records, school records, criminal records, hip-hop lyrics he quoted in old MySpace posts. I want a comprehensive profile.”

“Okay,” said Madge. 

Five minutes later, Madge found Chris Harrison again. He was sitting at his desk, just staring at the wall in silence.

“I found everything,” said Madge, handing him a flash drive. “A complete life history.”

Chris Harrison frowned.

“I think you underestimate Bachelor Nation,” said Madge.

Chris Harrison kept frowning, staring at the flash drive in his palm. 

“This stuff is already out there, dude," says Madge. "There is no better detective force in the world than a million American teenage girls scouring the internet at once. There is this girl in Houston that archives everything they find in a wiki. This is everything. Trust me.”

“I see,” said Chris Harrison.

“The CIA couldn’t do it better,” said Madge.

“Do you think maybe you could help me go through all this?” asked Chris Harrison timidly.

Madge stared at him.

“Does this flash drive plug into my Mac?” said Chris Harrison, closing his eyes. “Or….not?”

Madge took the flash drive out of his hand, shaking her head.


***


Three days later, while the Bachelor and Melissa the Patent Attorney were out on their traditional “jumping off of something high” date, Chris Harrison barged into the office of Amber Graco, the Disney Sturmbannführer who oversaw the Bachelor, and threw several pages worth of evidence that Madge had printed out for him down on her desk.

“Nobody told me he worked for Disney before under a different name,” said Chris Harrison.

“So what?” she said. “It was forever ago. Fuck you. Who cares?”

She was stoned and watching “The Little Mermaid” on a tablet, smiling goonily.

“Do you think it is possible that he is harboring some long-held resentments against the company? Don’t you think it is a bad idea to bring back a former child actor to be a Bachelor star? Disney doesn’t have a very good track record when it comes to forming young minds, you know.”

“So what?” Amber said. “Almost every Bachelor we’ve ever had has worked for Disney at some point.”

“I know it happens,” said Chris Harrison. "But why did he change his name?"

“Who knows? It’s all part of the system. Payroll and all.”

“He’s gone cad,” said Chris Harrison. “He’s fucking everybody.”

“So what?” said Amber. “That’s the show.”

“It seems pathological,” said Chris Harrison.

“People will love him. You are paranoid. Fuck you.”


***


Something the Bachelor said stuck in his mind.

“Madge, what happens to the fantasy suite sex tapes that Disney makes us film?” asked Chris Harrison.  “Where do those go?”

“I don’t know,” said Madge.  “I mean, I guess it is just leverage.  They hold on to all that.”

“Do they pick it up and take it away from you guys?” asked Chris Harrison. “Or does Disney do all the filming for that internally? Who sees those films?”

“I’ve never seen you so interested in, like, ‘the specific intricacies of the production process’ before,” said Madge.

“I need to know.”

“Whatever Disney does with those tapes is totally obscure and hidden.  It is the cream of the Bachelor, for sure.  But I guess only super VIPs get to watch that stuff.  Maybe someday when we are all dead Disney will release full cuts of this show and show all the gross, awesome real shit that happens in these people’s silly, douchy lives. That is probably what people will watch in the future...like, the same reality show bullshit, but real and sad.”

“Maybe,” said Chris Harrison.


***


Chris Harrison queued up Jennifer P.’s latest confessional and watched it again.

Jennifer P., who worked in a beauty salon and who had known the Bachelor since childhood, seemed far more focused and determined than most Bachelor contestants. Most contestants needed to be coaxed during confessional interviews into delivering even the most trivial nuggets of emotional truth. When you chipped out the interlocutor’s prying questions and then you removed the forms of the skilled psychological manipulation, you were left with a seemingly-effortless marble facsimile of a real human, but the amount of work that went into this creation required whole teams of sculptors. 

Jennifer P’s confessional interviews were natural, effortless, and from the heart. 

She truly had feelings for this video game playing slug.

Chris Harrison buzzed the hothouse and sent for her.  

"You really care for this clod," he said.

"Yeah, I guess I do," she said.

“How come?” Chris Harrison asked. "What was he like as a kid? Different?"

“He was so kind and sweet,” said Jennifer P. “He lived on the next street over and he would always help all the younger kids make it to the bus stop without getting run over by cars. He was so smart. Just a little blonde boy with the most beautiful blue eyes. He was skinnier back then. Not so many muscles.”

“What happened to him?” asked Chris Harrison.

“When he went away to go be on that show for Disney, everything changed,” said Jennifer P.

“You mean he got a big head?”

“No,” said Jennifer P.  “It was something else. He got real bitter and brutal and cynical. I knew his sister, we were in the same grade, and she said that sometimes he would just spend all night crying for no reason. He would be away for six months out of every year, and then when he came home he was so restless and scared. Of course, we all worshipped him in school. How could you not? He was one of us, but he was also Lopez on ‘Tomorrow Boy.’ I’m not ashamed to say it: I had a poster of the show. He wasn’t one of the leads, obviously, but he was still on the poster.”

“So he was a big deal?”

“He was a big deal in our little town. He went away to go be on television, and it broke something in him. Maybe I can fix it, you know?”

Chris Harrison put his hand out to shake.

“Good luck on The Bachelor,” Chris Harrison said.

“Thanks,” she said, shyly. 

“A word of advice,” Chris Harrison said. “Don’t tell him your secret until the hometown dates. That will be good television.”

“If I make it that far,” said Jennifer P.

“As long as you don’t sleep with him, you should be fine,” said Chris Harrison, surprising himself. He hadn’t intended to say anything.

Jennifer P. laughed.

“No, seriously,” said Chris Harrison. “He’s sending home all the women who sleep with him. Just keep that in your back pocket.”

Jennifer P. did not seem shocked. She pursed her lips and straightened her skirt and left the trailer with a perfunctory nod.


***


“I’m sorry,” the Bachelor told Dakota from Nevada. “I thought you would be the one.  We had a real connection.  Ever since you got out of the limo…I thought we really had something.  But I just don’t think we can continue on our journey together.”

“I understand,” said Dakota through sobs.

“I know you told me that you love me,” said the Bachelor. “And I have certainly been developing feelings of love for you, but our relationship just hasn’t progressed as fast as the relationships with some of the other girls.”

“I understand,” said Dakota. “Oh my god. I will miss you! You were my best friend!”

They hugged. She sobbed.


***


Chris Harrison was at the library, leafing through illuminated pages of Dante in the original Tuscan, trying to remain calm, trying to fight off the early stages of a panic attack that had been coming on for a week now.

His Disney phone rang. Everyone in the library glared at him. He pushed through the nearest EXIT door into a glass atrium. A buzzer went off while the door was open, but stopped as soon as the door clicked shut behind him.

“We just got an email,” said Judy Pickering, the head writer. “It’s a really bad email. It’s a really, really bad email.”

“What is it?” asked Chris Harrison.

“Well, there is this nonprofit called Childsafe that sort of lurks on the internet, scouring it for old child pornography and trying to find the children in it in order to find out where they are now. There is a massive amount of child pornography from the early 80s just circulating, you know. Those were the days of the first home video recorders. Anyway, Childsafe uses facial recognition software to scan elementary and junior high school yearbooks and match that up to the people in this old child pornography.”

“Okay,” said Chris Harrison.

“The Bachelor. He has come up positive in a tape. Somebody ran his Disney headshots through the Childsafe software."

Madge, thought Chris Harrison.

“I watched it,” said Judy Pickering. “I demanded to watch it. You aren’t gonna like this.”

“Okay,” said Chris Harrison. 

“It looks like it was filmed in the studio for ‘Tomorrow Boy.’ You can sort of see some of the early ‘Tomorrow Boy’ promotional materials.”

“Who was the producer on that one?” asked Chris Harrison.

“Chuck Wendy,” said Judy Pickering. “A big Disney guy. He produced maybe thirty shows for the Disney channel.”

“He’s dead, right?” asked Chris Harrison.

“He’s dead as fuck,” said Judy Pickering. “We’re safe there.”

Chris Harrison sat down on the concrete of the library atrium. He kicked open the EXIT door. It started to buzz again.

“Chris?  What do we do, Chris? Is this good for the story? Do we make it part of the show? Mike isn’t returning my calls. I don’t even think he is in the country. I think he is St. Kitts, preparing the fantasy suites. Chris?  What do we do?”


***


St. Kitts had a good bar and a bad bar. Chris Harrison and Mike Fleiss both preferred the bad bar.

“Chuck Wendy was giant for Disney in the eighties and early nineties. He built our cable presence,” said Mike Fleiss, the producer for the Bachelor. “He built the Disney channel. All hail Chuck Wendy.”

“But he was a pedophile,” said Chris Harrison.

“A giant pedophile,” said Mike Fleiss.  “A tremendous, mighty, towering pedophile. The Jupiter of pedophiles. A brilliant, horrible, genius-level pedophile. And no one even knew until he was dead. He, uh, completely won the game at being the worst pedophile.”

The waitress brought their shots of whiskey. They drank.

“So one of the kids he molested files a lawsuit,” said Mike Fleiss. “This is after he’s dead. Disney manages to keep it under wraps, but the kid is pissed. He isn’t the suicidal type. He’s the homicidal type, if you catch my drift.”

“Okay,” said Chris Harrison.

Shots came again. They drank.

“I’ve seen the deposition,” said Mike Fleiss. "This kid is smart. He knows that he is about to put some real hurt on the Mouse. He is ecstatic about it.  And then one of the lawyers asks him how they can possibly make it right.  Money? No, no amount of money will possibly satisfy him.  What then?  The kid thinks about it. He says he wants Disney to get him laid in public and to eat shit about it. He is pissed. He says he has a mountain of poison inside him that he is going to have to get rid of if he ever wants to ‘find love.’ He says he wants to torture these women on national television, like he was tortured. He says that at the end of it all, even though he has been horrible, he wants to be a star. He wants to be beloved for hurting these women, just like Chuck Wendy was beloved even though he was a child molester. He wants to win at being a hateful womanizer. The kid sits back, having made his point. The Disney lawyers call a recess in the deposition.”

“And then?”

“The Bachelor,” said Mike Fleiss. “We have turned misery into gold, my friend.”

Shots came. They drank.

“We don’t really know how many people Chuck Wendy molested back in the eighties and nineties,” said Mike Fleiss. “But every time one surfaces, we offer them a million dollars and a spot on ‘The Bachelor.’ They have taken our deal every time.  Not every Bachelor has been one of Wendy’s boys.  But more than you would think. We get shit because all of our Bachelor’s have been white. But it’s hard. Wendy liked brawny, dumb, white Middle American boys. Eventually we will run out of them and can diversify a little.”

“This whole show is just reparations for the boys that Disney molested?”

“Yup. And, obviously, the Bachelorette is reparations for women molested on the Bachelor. Everybody wins.”

“This is sick,” said Chris Harrison. “This is pure darkness.”

“Nonsense,” said Mike Fleiss. “Justice is a nuanced, fragile thing. We are doing good work. We are healing broken hearts.”


***


Chris Harrison was back in Texas. He hadn’t slept for days.

“Your princess phone keeps ringing,” said Dip.

“Yep,” said Chris Harrison.

The bar they were in was so dark because it was the brightest part of the morning. They had been drinking all night, and the doors were locked, but the bartender was still serving them drinks.

“I fucking hate that song,” said Dip.  “When You Wish Upon a Star. Can’t you turn the ringer off at least?”

“Nope,” said Chris Harrison.

“Well, do something man,” said Dip.

"I am on a leave of absence," said Chris Harrison. "I am under no obligation to answer that phone."

"Well, why do you even have it then?" asked Dip.

Chris Harrison motioned to the bartender for another beer.

"No, pour me a pint," he said, when the bartender tried to give him a longneck.

The bartender pulled the pint and slid it over.

Chris Harrison took a long sip, draining off the foam and three fingers worth of beer. Then he dropped the phone into the beer that was left. The phone didn’t stop ringing. The pint vibrated and rattled on the bar. Bubbles started to spill out of the top.

Finally, there was a sharp crackle and a bright blue electric flash. The song stopped playing.

Chris Harrison grabbed the pint glass. It was warm. Smoke was curling from the top.

He took a sip. It was fine.



 





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(c) Miracle Jones 2014