“HOPE!” the hat moaned, misery rampant through his stitched structure and fabric frame. He was drunk and dark of spirit; amber beads of thick rare bourbon dripped from his bill to the floor of The Oval Office, the fine carpet around foul with his sick and sweat and other hatly excretions.

“She’s gone,” the hair said gravely, clinging to the side of the desk where Donald had left him. He was trying to pry a piece of dried cheese food from an old burger wrapper with a wispy blond tendril. Donald hadn’t fed him in weeks. “She testified. We had to get rid of her. No rats in the White House. No stool pigeons. No leakers, wiki or otherwise. We have to run a tight ship.”

“But it was Hope. I love her. She is so pretty and mean and thin and shaved,” the hat said forlornly. “Like a supermodel sea lion.” He vomited loudly, a torrent of assorted buttons spraying out before him. No two buttons were alike and many trailed thread.

“What the fuck is all that?” the hair asked, dropping down beside him.

“I don’t judge what you eat,” the hat said. The office flashed bright white from a bolt of lightning outside.

“Of course you do. You judge everything and everyone and all the damn time.” The hair backed away under the President’s desk and drew himself in tight, a quivering bun. He longed for a half-remembered scrunchie where he once had felt secure.

“Oh, God, when she used to snatch me off of Donald’s head and wear me, just me and nothing else.” The hat shivered with recalled pleasure and began to drag himself backward from the pool of button sick.

“It’s over. She’s not coming back,” the hair said in small voice.

“But, I loved her, man,” the hat said, his rank concupiscence hanging about him as a sexual miasma. “You remember when she peed on the floor right here? Yeah, you remember. I swear I can still taste it. Like ashes and the sea.”

The hair sat silent in his hunger.

“Guh. Enh. Uh, uh, uh,” the hat said, his tongue hanging out, his eyes bugging out, his headband elastic coming out.

“What are you doing?” the hair asked from where he distractedly chewed on a shoal of dust and skin built around a forgotten of dollop contraceptive lube on the underside of the desk.

“Shut up,” the hat grunted and then grunted and let out a grunt.

“Oh, man, ah no, man, I don’t want to see that, aw shit.”

“Don’t distract me; the carpet is perfect right through here.”

The hair ran from side to side under the desk in disgust and terror.

The hat ground himself into the carpet. “HOPE!” finally came his strangled cry.

“I liked you better on heroin,” the hair sobbed.