“Do ya think she will like it?” the USA hat asked anxiously.

“Uh, yeah. Sure,” the MAGA hat replied, too depressed to savage his hick vaultmate with any enthusiasm.

“It’s the first I done painted for her,” the USA hat continued, oblivious. “She’s so bootiful and smart and talks real good. I hope she likes it. I surely do.”

MAGA hat groaned. Donald had taken the hair with him to Japan and left both the hats behind, locked in the White House toupee vault together like a couple of animals. The smell of the paint made him junk sick. He wanted to vomit.

“I’m gonna paint another,” USA hat said. “And another and another. Sarah is my muse.”

MAGA hat idly wondered where this truck-stop shower rape of a hat had learned a word like “muse.” He was so bored. Donald had refused to leave him a phone to terrorize Twitter with and when he watched TV, USA hat begged him to turn it to a re-run of Hee-Haw so incessantly, he learned not to turn it on.

“I’m bored,” he announced. And I want heroin, an ocean of heroin he added just to himself.

“You could paint a picture iffen you want,” the USA hat. He hummed to himself as he sketched out a rough outline of Sarah in the nude on a fresh canvas, the misshapen lumps of her sweaty flesh coming together in horrible wads.

“Can I paint a jolly swastika fucking you to death?”

“You can paint anythin’ you can want,” USA hat said. “Your only limatation is yore imaginations!”

“Barf. Do you have any barf-colored paint? And despair, what the color of despair?”

“Ox tongue,” the USA hat said without pause in his sketching, the shard of charcoal grasped firmly in his folded bill.

“Which? Which is ox tongue?” the MAGA hat demanded. The USA hat hummed tuneless to himself, working on getting the heavy-lidded and utterly dead eyes of his crush just right.

MAGA hat thought about pressing him but instead scooted over to a blank canvas, picked up a charcoal stick and began to slash at it boldly, just try to ride his feelings of rage and abandonment. A screaming face formed.

“A brush, a brush,” he demanded. “And red. Fresh blood red and the black-red of old blood.”

The USA hat slid brushes and paints over to him and noted without a trace of an accent, “Old blood is brown-red or even just brown. Stay vivid.”

The MAGA hat didn’t hear him as he squeezed the tubes into mounds in front of him and grabbed up a brush. He laid down thick lines on the canvas, almost scooping up paint with the brush for some and scrubbing the bristles to the heel of the ferrule on others.

“Impasto,” the USA hat whispered. The MAGA hat didn’t hear him in his furious ecstasy. More paint, more paint as the face seemed to push its way out of the canvas. The brush snapped in his bill and MAGA hat dug the broken handle into the canvas, ripping the heavy fabric before dashing to the floor of the vault and snatching up another.

As he spat rage at the canvas, USA hat turned on the TV behind them and used the TiVo to search through the last half-hour of news coverage that had built up. He found what he wanted and froze the screen. When he turned back, the MAGA let the brush fall from his bill and was breathing in great ragged gasps.

The painting was a vision of Hell, the skinned, howling face of Sarah, the thick paint running in spots, which only added to the ghastly effect. The center of her mouth was stabbed rent in the canvas, but you couldn’t see the easel or the wall behind. There was nothing, a horrible no-color that went on forever.

“Donald is bringing you home a new friend,” the USA hat whispered.

“What do you mean?”

“Look,” he said. “Look at the TV.”

MAGA hat whirled around and froze. Two white trucker hats in front of Donald on a table. “Donald & Shinzo, Make Alliance Even Greater,” they read in gold embroidery.

MAGA hat screamed.