The smell of frying meat woke Huma from a night of uneasy dreams: hands peeling away from shadows, Senate subpoenas, a disappointed Prophet, peace be upon him, staring at her with glowing coal eyes and pulling at his beard in concern.

Hillary wasn’t beside her. When she felt the pit Hillary had dug in the mattress, the pool of congealed sweat was cold. She got out of bed and followed the smell of meat and heat down to the basement of their brownstone.

“My love?” she asked at the top of the basement stairs.

“Hillary?” she asked, louder. As she walked down the steps she noticed a nacreous glow along the floor of the basement. It was shifting to blue as she descended.

“Hillary?” she called from the bottom of the stairs. “I see a glow. Are you communing with The Outer Gods, beings who exist outside of time and hunger for the souls of man? Would you like me to make you a smoothie? A strawberry smoothie?”

Huma crossed the basement, carefully stepping around the summoning circle carved into the bare concrete of the floor. The light was coming from under one of the doors to the brownstone’s storage spaces. Hillary had used contractors to burrow under the houses to either side, creating vast a subterranean lair. When the contractors were finished, they had ended up in Prospect Park in many wet pieces.

“Hillary?” Huma called. She tapped the doorknob quickly, expecting a shock. It was just warm, blood-warm, like a hand had held it for a long time. She turned the knob and pushed open the door. The blue light rushed out and swallowed her. She put her hands up and waited in her doorway for her eyes to adjust. She smelled meat, cooking meat, and her mouth began to water.

In the room sat something like an enormous electric clamshell. The top lid rose and the room got brighter. Hillary lay in the tanning bed, nude, basting in a pool of sweat. She stretched lazily, reaching her arms above her head, her slack breasts slipping over the side of her chest to nestle in her armpits.

“Hillary?” Huma asked. “What is this? What are you doing?”

“Joe wants a woman of color, by the Elder Gods, I’ll give him a woman of color!” the elderly woman said, her face twisted in hate.

“My love, I don’t think it is literally about skin color,” Huma said quietly.

“I figure I’ll be Kamala-colored in a couple of weeks, maybe hit Val Demmings or Keisha Lance Bottoms by the convention,” Hillary said, ignoring her.

In the heat of the room, in that horrible blue light, Huma gathering her dressing robe about her, chilled. She swallowed hard and said, “The African-American base will never accept this.”

“Do you remember the movie Soul Man? Did you ever see Soul Man?” Hillary asked. “I want you to see if they ever made that drug for real.”

Huma muttered in assent.

“I mean, what if Joe wants me Stacy Abrams black?” Hillary asked. “She’s field slave dark with a house Mammy body. It’s a hard combo to hit with just padding and a tanning bed.”

“Hillary!” Huma said, the small core of squishy liberalism still inside her scandalized.

“Or maybe I could just hollow her out and wear her?” Hillary mused. “She’s fat enough.”

“My love, can we just not live our lives?” Huma asked. “We have each other, you have a grandchild now…”

“I have already descended to Xibalba and sacrificed to Xiquiripat and Cuchumaquic for Abrams’ death, Huma,” Hillary said in a flat, dead voice. “The Flying Scab and Gathered Blood never fail.”

Huma involuntary sketched out a sign against the evil eye.

“But I haven’t forgotten about you, dear Huma,” Hillary said, leering. “I’m making sure to tan all over.”

She strained forward with her arms and hands, trying to sit up. She slipped in the yellowed sweat and grunted, finally rocking forward and back until she grabbed the back of her knees and hauled them toward her chest.

“Tanning all over,” she repeated to Huma, lying back and splaying her legs, forcing her labia to part like rotted lace, the old blood reek of an abattoir filling the small hot room.

“Once I’m President, I will make this all worth it, Huma,” Hillary said, sighing, closing her eyes. “I will make them all suffer and it will all be worth it.”

Hillary grunted and queefed as her mutilated sex popped and sizzled in the blue light of the tanning bed, the rumbling issuing forth from her bone womb low and deep like summer thunder.