Dawn’s rosy fingers scratched an itch that stirred the Poet-Driver awake. His eyes blinked open on the bald realization that he was so over drifting and doing donuts across Mother Earth’s Marvelous Green Mound. It had been a sweet gig: They’d built him an awesome dirt track and he’d made his name and dazzled social media driving an ATV while performing a poem for Exclusive World Broadcast. As a daredevil poet he’d been loved and leaved, laureated and lionized. But that was now so woke-era.

“I need a bitcoin pivot in this New Day of Bling and Ka-ching,” he told Wild Cat Kelly, looking out on Nvaluation Valley where the West does dances. “There’s so much greed out there they gussy it up into spare people, give ‘em houses and self-driving cars, write ‘em off as dependents and make ‘em shareholders, to the blazes with attribution bias!”

“You mean, tesslin’ muskrat kisses with goo-goo-googly eyes at the Big Rock Candy Mountain?” Wild Cat said.

“Hokey smoke, Wild Cat! You could keep a Sam at water all the livelong day, but you won’t land telly-gents fish-all or arty fish-all. It makes no difference if your bait app speaks large- or smallmouth bass, is foxed, tuckered, maddowed, roganed or even yawps back at you in rhyme. And anyhow the Chinese do it all a lot cheaper.”

Wild Cat began to feel the power, unpacking memes from thought-bubble wrap. The power surged:

“I’m having a moment,” he said, looking mighty pale, hands raised high and eyes shut tight. His pause at last gave birth: “Yee-haw! I got ‘er!”

He rolled his moment into a single wordpunch: “Romantasy!”

“The neroest I caligulated to that aurelian ruin like to give me a claudatious ciceronian ceasar in school,” The Poet-Driver said. “Laid me up a week!” 

“Wronk Rominks, PD!” Wild Cat said. “What we’re talking here like to come from a Mary Poppins portmanteau: Romantasy! Bodice-rippers with pixie dust! And this john-ray’s got it all: Werewolf- and vampire-adjacent princesses languishing in Tudorbethan castles from structural gaslighting, for fantasy; whose misgendered revenge bodies revenate to kick ass, for empowerment and the game market; who pit their mettle crossing personal-improvement deserts to O.T.P. and H.E.A. Female YAs eat it up like hotcakes!”

The Poet-Driver groomscrolled gauzy goth goblins and grisettes clear through to grishkins in their maisonettes. He’d sported in his day among she-noodles but swined those pearls, certain that life sub-umbra was clear not what it yooster be. Nowadays he’d rate no more than some sorcelling old possum with a pointy beard and beetling brows, hairy ears to match and lots of bro-ha-has.

“Cat dawg, PD! Quit watching them fool poodcosts and see it plain before your own pair o’ pie-radical eyes!” Wild Cat said.

The Poet-Driver divided attention from groomscrolling.

“You will write a novel!”

“Not really my—”

“Hang on now: You are the Poet-Driver, a Poet Laureate. Your performances aboard the ATV cemented your Celebrity Status in the c-suite. Your Poet-Driver Donut Cookbook made you a household name. Now you will turn your seesawed hand to Big Publishing’s latest hot commodity. Your immortal prose will be clasped to nubile breasts by the millions, copied by the thousands, and a guaran-golly-teed golden skyrocket into Marvelous Marvel’s Major Motion Picture Empyrean.”

“Now you’re talking, pard!”

“The setting will be high school, that forbidding fastness, which separates teen princesses from their unicorns and endungeons them, their princes, young witches and warlocks, vampires and werewolves, they-wolves, shape-shifters and superheroes the world over. Among these nixies, pixies, and trixies you will curate the paranormal journey to romance of a certain YA named Gloria. You will title your opus Phantasma Gloria! But for killer cover art, you’re halfway home!”

“Spoken like a true oracle, my brother!”

“So garage the ATV and leaf-blow them browned laurels from your hobbled thoughts! Don’t let a momentary dry spell of creative juices fence you in! Lean into this new conversation on your personal journey! De-center hiphapless motocross poetry and reinvent yourself as a Romantasist!”

Phantasma Gloria

Once upon a time a disenchanted maiden named Gloria languished at the virtual sooty hearth of a Storybook Cottage-style suburban rancher in Middlesex. She did regular podcasts curating her journey and its perils, cherry-picking astrology and tarot interpretations to claim props as an Influencer, bring her O.T.P., and live H.E.A. 

For Gloria rolled eyes under the cruel yoke of Joan the Wicked Bee-yatch whom she coded Wibby, the evil stepmother who had cast a spell on her father. Wibby forced Gloria to eat colonized food and wear hideous clothes, such as fair-trade dull linen pinafores and wooden shoes hand-carved on Farøe-with-a-can-you-even-fucking-believe-it-line-through-the-o, among other bougee-cringe indignities. Yet Fortune smiled indulgently on this disenchanted princess: Her father and Wibby often were out of town on business and the housekeeper Esmeralda, a Pisces like Gloria—Wibby was an Aries, of course—was a supportive indigenous spirit.

The Problem was School.

The Issue was that Gloria’s busy schedule simply left no time for it.

As an Influencer in the ascendant, School had nothing to teach our YA protagonista except for putting up with the minor arcana of Fifty-Seven Varieties of Nonsense. This began with gym class and dumped like thick ketchup across day upon day of geography, geoscience, geometry, geomancy—or whatever, to lunch; and then history, and language arts which honestly wasn’t all that bad because it was last period and taught by cute Mr. Mackenzie who liked poetry and let her write haikus for extra credit.

Gloria’s father suggested that she think of school as her job.

“Finishing high school is the only way you’re going to get anywhere in life, sweetie,” he said.

Anticipating the silver lining that he was sure to flash through Gloria’s quick-calculating teenage brain, he added that her current compensation-and-benefits package included being fed, clothed, and housed in their Storybook Cottage-style suburban rancher in Middlesex, with unlimited internet service, her own smartphone and credit card.

“Once you punch the high school ticket, the rest will follow,” her father said. “You’ll see.”

But Gloria had no suitably paranormal-esoteric vocabulary to begin this conversation. Thus she languished. Until one day a virtual hand reached down from The Cloud and selected it for her in the form of a classic horror movie. She and her BFF Periwinkle watched it one afternoon after school with an assist from Wibby’s weed gummies. They couldn’t believe their eyes: There it was! I mean, like practically a doc!

Oh. My. God: Where to even start?

Ho-kay: There was this like vast dark castle, on a treeless mountain, in eternal night. It was ruled by an old man who creeped her out as much as always-smiling Mr. Peltzig, the Middlesex High principal. Another creepo named Dr. Weirdograss looked like the guidance counselor who sits in his office all day rewatching seasons of “Breaking Bad.” The organist was some old dead white man who could have been the band teacher. And there were like enough zombies to make up everyone from the goddess sisterhood and star athletes to the kids-no-one-likes.

Whoa! Our YA protagonistas stared at the big screen with their mouths open. They stared at each other. They stared back at the screen. And then Gloria had a satori:

“Here’s what we’ll do, Winkie: My dad said going to school is my job, and finishing it punching a ticket. So we’ll weaponize ticket-punching! We’ll punch tickets at uv-ry class, uv-ry day, and run circles around uv-ryone! We’ll show them all!”

“Umm! I love it!”

The die was cast; the casting was bold. Thenceforth our YA protagonistas raced through school upstairs and down beating the bell to every class. They flew 3D figure-eights in phantasmagoric magic-lantern formations that would have dazzled game developers no less than doctrinaire Marxists, punching tickets left, right, and center. They were juiced to find fellow night creatures, princes, young witches and warlocks, vampires and werewolves, they-wolves, shape-shifters and superheroes, all velvet-corded on their own majors-only teen bardo. School days became weeks, weeks became months; months ran into summer vaykay, then a new school year. And, behold, it was very good.

Gloria curated each day’s adventures as “The Ticket Punchin Lama Mama” in podcasts that viraled into cybersensation.

And then she found a higher bardo. Through new eyes she saw a kid-no-one-likes morph into an enchanting androgyne. They journeyed together as soulmates to realize synastries and explore this loftier realm borne on a golden half-shell beneath the moon’s greenish glow, on course for Black Moon Lilith. And they left School, Wibby, and all else on earth—except for podcasts and social media—to take care of itself in its own good time.

Peter Geier has reported courts and written features for local, national, and international news publications. He has independently published a variety of fiction and nonfiction pieces, including humor and speculative fiction and an anthologized story on a trip to a Turkish house of delight. He recently finished “Border Town Capriccio: An Epic in Twenty Short Chapters.”