A voice sweet as honey, her striking personality leaves you with that bitter aftertaste and you don’t quite know why.

“I’m Bernadette Cacca! It’s my pleasure to play for your The Manteno Optimal Club musical theater sing-along! I will livestream here on my personal page every Tuesday from 7:30-10 and Saturday from 5-7:30 during the 3 week The Manteno Optimal Club hiatus! The Manteno Optimal Club will be back for Season 2 on Oct 12! Follow me for details! And always on Instaspam @BernCacca (except tonight – TOILET ISSUES) Comment with requests!”

Bernadette Moran Cacca wants to open up an arcade in Manteno. No, not a slot-machine room like “Winnie’s;” rather, a video-game arcade. Hoping to sell more Craptocoin, she will only accept her funny money from the gamers. 

“Just think, my WONDERFUL customers will HAVE to pay in Craptocoin, mined the old-fashioned way by ME!”

“Git-git-git”

“Oh not now, honey. I have business plans to make.”

Butthurt by his wife’s disinterest in his mating call, Peppi Cacca claps back:

“You know, hon, if we can convince the developers at your favorite strip mall to put in that much-needed crossing signal, we can profit by providing the port-o-johns for the job. Let’s say we write a proposal and submit a bid if they accept.”

“My aunt Sonya will tell YOU about all the things I do for this community! I volunteer my time playing multiple accordion covers of popular show tunes for the Manteno Optimal Club!”

“She is also Optimus Prime.”

“Yeah, and Sonya is running for mayor. She knows the owner of that consumer shopping center. Back in 1991, he saw someone going down the road who owned one.”

“What about that Poopy’s you always wanted to open?”

“Stop causing so much drama, Peppi,” Bernadette gaslights her husband.

Bern goes down and applies for credit at the local loan-shark office and gets approved. According to her ex-lover Damien Hurlbutt, sharks eat poop, so Bernadette is not surprised they approve her credit.

“Scary” Barry Reynolds’ former “President of the Office of Belonging” at the Mathew B Johnson School of Intrepid Arts, Sonya Marie Smith Moran, is running for mayor to complete his failed agenda for the college takeover of Albion, Indiana.  

Some of the things Sonya is wanting to do are abolish cats and pitbulls from being allowed in the town limits, open a charter school to be run by the college with city funding and close the nature trails and centers to anyone without a “membership” paid in full with Craptocoin. Bog Witch Bernadette Cacca will collect tolls and eat anyone who refuses to comply. Yum, cannibalism.

She’s planning to do drug raids on houses she’s thinks are drug houses, just for fun. What better to do when you’re bored?

Sonya also wants to abolish the local low income clinic because she’s pro-life. However, she’s running as a Democrat. Since when did common sense matter to a narc-a-doodle, anyway?

Sonya Moran knocks on the doors of all the Albion residents, including the people she’s ticked off most every Saturday at between 1 and 2PM hoping to harass them, since they have blocked her on all social medias and don’t return her letters. She even sends them birthday gifts hoping to con them via guilt into sending her a thank-you card. She really wants hard to win over people who want zero contact. 

“You’re prejudiced against the poor, humans, flora and fauna. You don’t even like cats. Who hates cats?” Kitty Bee says as they laugh at the silly moron running for office.

“I have black friends. I’m not racist.” 

Kitty rolls her ebony eyes and lets the door hit the wannabe politician on the way out.

“Narcs be startin’ somethin’…and it ain’t no picnic,” the broadcast journalist says to their girlfriend.

“I’m walking away from you now!” Sonya snarks as she walks away from another uninterested voter. “Oh hello. Get out there and vote!” Sonya tells another stranger on the street with her usual forced-smile.

“I was sitting there when the log emerged” Bernadette Cacca details her newly-formed-turds (NFTs) on the phone to her lover JB, the neighborhood turd-burglar, then she hears a knock at the door.

“Hi Manager. My daughter wants to play Running in Manteno, where do we put the quarters?”

“You can get some Craptocurrency from me.”

“What?”

“Our games only take Craptocoin. I will gladly exchange! I just mined some now!” Bern says as she wipes her buttocks.

The father waves his hand in disgust as his daughter giggles, the family walking out the joint.

Kankakee junk-emailer, sociopath and petty criminal Pat Splatt will do anything to make a buck. He is hoping to get rich enough to someday implant a diamond in his forehead. 

While leaning against the wall in his chair, scraping the internet for contacts to spam about his payola scheme for content creators, Pat gets a call.

“Hell, Satan speaking.”

“Is this Patrick Oswald Splatt?’

“You’ve got the POS.”

“This is Sonya Moran. I got your email today and want some bots.”

“Hey babe, I can hear the smile in your voice today. I am your moneymaker!”

“Yeah. I want to become the biggest PooTuber on Earth. My name is Sonya Moran. You have heard of my niece Bernadette Cacca right?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“She was on the front of the Kankakee Sentinel. You DO live in Kankakee County, right?”

“What can I do ya fer?”

“I am running for office here in Indiana. I want to make a channel where I make videos where I pay my BIGGEST fans just for subscribing and watching. But I don’t people to think I am bribing them. Just like my EXTRAORDINARY niece Bernadette, I want people to SEE the acts of charity I am spending my busy day doing. Why be nice to people if nobody can see it? I do a LOT for this community.”

Pat begins to nod off.

“With your assistance, we can build a botnet to pad my followers, and argue with ANYBODY who disagrees. Hello?”

Snoring is heard.

“Hey babe, I think you’re hot.”

“Oh hey babe. What’s that about getting together?”

“Just seeing if you’re paying attention. I want to hire you to make a network of pretend followers so that real people will also look at me give all that money away, and do good deeds for the community. I am running for mayor here in Albion, Indiana and I intend to win!”

“You sounds like my kind of person!”

Sonya Moran is really on a mission to bully her residents out of her complex at Prairieland Country Club Apartments For the Disabled down by the Albion mills into leaving, because she is a complete and utter troll who has zero empathy. Compassion, what’s that? 

Complaints have been pouring into the Department of Housing and Urban Development that she has been issuing lunacy letters falsely accusing her low-income, disabled tenants of violating their leases. How would she feel if she were in their place? I feel confident some of the people would gladly trade their chronic pain and bladder problems with her so they can have better lives. Oh, and she hates cats.

Sonya knocks on her residents’ doors at 9:30 AM to remind them that she is running for office, saying it would be unacceptable to vote for someone else, because she plans to own the housing committee. Must be a thing to live in fear. After all, she is a wussy little narcissist. 

Jade Utica is not having any of Sonya’s crap. After getting unwanted knocks on her door, waking her up after a rough night battling her brain disease, she is not about to sit down let the so-called “Do-gooder” bully her into homelessness. After chatting with her neighbors about the junk her landlord left on her door, she finds out she is not alone.

Meanwhile, Sonya’s PooTube channel has been getting thousands of followers and commenters every day, thanks to Pat Splatt. 

“I just know I am going to win this election,” Sonya says to her campaign donors at her rally. “If they don’t cry for me, I will give them something to cry about!”

Bernadette Cacca and her Poopy Groupies cheer in conformance.

Undead Greg Schneissder gives a speech:

“This is the best thing. I have constantly and continuously been moved and inspired by the inventive, communal ways citizens found during the darkest days of the lockdown to seek out the light, keep connecting. 

The thought of two people, across time and place, creating one thing: so beautiful to me, on its own. But to see it come together, in one room, the beautiful moment, both optimistic overture and grand, grand finale. What a lovely symbol of perseverance, of hope fulfilled. What a metaphor. What a tonic. What a reminder. I was unprepared for how moved I would be by this story.

The only thing *not* at all surprising about it? That Sonya Moran was involved. So let me also love on her for a second: in that weird way that all of Albion is all just a small town after all, I walked into a bar this past Friday, where Bern was celebrating a friend’s birthday, surrounded by the beautiful, lovely, joyous people that she seems to attract (birds of a feather and all that), and she gave me THE. BEST. HUG. And a greeting that made me feel like the only person in the world. 

A friend of hers asked if I were an actor or singer, and I think I mumbled something like “I wish.” What I should have said, “No, but when I am in the company of Sonya, I am a STAR.”

As people watch Greg’s gushing, comments pour into Sonya’s PooTube channel:

“You need to remove your twitter post about my friend. Especially when you were selfish enough to do what you did and then block her. Because she is the only person who matters! Look at me, I’m a troll who crawled out from under my bridge because I need to get a hobby and I hate myself.. I don’t appreciate the way you treated her.”

The cheers of support from Sonya’s bootlickers are interrupted by some breaking news:

“Kitty Bee reporting live from Albion breaking news. Indiana officials and a spokesperson from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development have accused Albion landlord Sonya Moran of discrimination and harassment. Residents have complained that Mrs. Moran has been accusing them falsely of violating their leases, failing to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and even threatening to evict them. We will bring you more news as it develops. Back to you.”

TO BE CONTINUED