by Cathy Ulrich

The sad little dictator’s former nanny is being executed today. She’s not the only one, of course, but she’s the one we recognize, the one we remember from her television program, her round face telecast into our houses, hello boys and girls. 

She always said hello boys and girls to start, always smiled with her lips closed. 

Our parents said she had to keep her lips closed like that, or who knows what secrets might come spilling out, but it was only when she smiled that her lips were like that. When she talked, her mouth came open just like a regular person. 

Hello boys and girls, she said, and from our little houses, kneeling on dirty wooden floors, we answered: Hello, hello.

The sad little dictator’s former nanny didn’t get her television program until after the sad little dictator was too old to need a nanny anymore, and of course his father was still alive then, his father the large gruff despot, who hated speaking to people unless he had to, and then it was in snips and snaps, single words as full sentences. 

Except his speeches, our parents say. His speeches were so grand. 

The sad little dictator’s father held parades in the main street of town, with rows of mustached men marching along in time. One of them played a shiny silver tuba and one played a trombone. We loved how, on sunny days, they shimmered and shone, and we waved our little flags for them, we clapped our little hands. 

When he was small, the sad little dictator didn’t go to the parades, stayed in that big fancy palace with the nanny, behind thick walls. 

That poor boy, our parents said sometimes, but only in safe, small spaces, only when no one but us could hear. 

When he was bigger, the sad little dictator came to the parades with his father and stood in that same stiff way, chests pigeoning out, father and son side by side, and up, up, up the road the mustached men would go. 

We all loved the sad little dictator’s former nanny when she did her television program, when she said hello boys and girls, when she showed us numbers and colors and shapes and wrote words on a blackboard in pretty pink chalk, words like obedience, trust, safety, nation. 

We all loved her till the screen went black and her voice came to us in that dark after, goodbye boys and girls. 

This is what we know about the sad little dictator’s former nanny: 

• her handwriting was very tidy 
• she always wore aprons with ruffles 
• when she laughed, it sounded like one of the birds we had heard from behind the walls at the palace grounds, a high, sweet cackle 
• she had no children of her own, no little ones to bake cookies for and pinch their cheeks 

• she never smiled and showed us her teeth, which were, we suspected, perfect and white like all the other people on our televisions 
• she is being executed today 

No one knows why the former nanny is being executed, or no one that can say knows. There are rumors, of course, that she had an illicit lover, that she said the wrong thing, that she told tales out of school, that she was a traitor, a thief, a spy. 

There are rumors that are worse than that — that she did nothing, said nothing, stole nothing. That the sad little dictator is executing his former nanny because, simply, that is what sad little dictators do. 

Her hands are tied behind her back and we remember her hands like the hands of our mothers, writing tidily in pink chalk on the blackboard from our childhoods. We wish for a moment we could have been touched by those hands, the way the sad little dictator must have been, those small, soft hands, we think, though we don’t actually know that they are that small or that soft. 

The former nanny walks up the steps to the gallows, one, two, three, and we watch the way we watched her on her television program, kneeling on dirty wooden floors in our little homes, hoping they will pull the gag from her mouth so that she can say one last time goodbye boys and girls, and take us with her into the dark after. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cathy Ulrich once rode on a float in a parade. She remembers the waving. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Fork, Okay Donkey and Juked.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently 90 MILES: SELECTED AND NEW, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. He has been taking photographs on the road for the last three decades. When he is not writing, he is out riding his motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of the Southeast, photographing disappearing urban and rural landscapes. His 10th volume of poetry, THE PAINTED BUNTING’S LAST MOLT, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2020.