News Story: Vice President Kamala Harris decried GOP efforts to tighten mail-in-voting rules, saying they hurt rural residents who couldn’t go to Kinko’s to copy their driver’s license.

“Jeb,” she cried. “Don’t go!”

I paused at the door of our sod hut, turned, and took her face in my hands. “Elvira,” I said, “I am your man, and you are my birthin’ person. You know I hate to go. But a cisgender man’s gotta do what a cisgender man’s gotta do.”

She buried her face in her gingham apron. “It’s not that important. We don’t have to vote.”

“Don’t talk like that. It’s our duty. I have to go and get photocopies of our driver’s licenses, and if that means headin’ across the prairie to find a Kinko’s, that’s what it means.”

“Wait! Do you have enough supplies? You got your pemmican?”

I checked my pouch. “Mebbe. Don’t rightly know what that is. Sounds like it should be a citizen of the country of Pemmica. I got some energy bars, they’ll do. Say, I should take my Bowie knife, in case I run into trouble.”

“You want your Jim Bowie knife or your David Bowie knife?”

“The Army ran all the sexually ambiguous glam kids off the territory, so prolly the Jim. All right, wish me well. If’n I’m not back in four days, you know what to do.”

“Call the sheriff.”

“Right. He might notice smoke signals, if he’s close. Or you can text him. Might want to send him a Facebook direct message, too, just to be safe.”

I went out to the stable and hitched up two of my best horses to the buggy. They champed at the bit and stomped their hooves, eager for exercise. Or was it chomped at the bit? I googled that one. Yes, champed. While I was at it, I checked the traffic between the homestead and Bomfark, the nearest town. No major slowdowns, no washed-out gullies, no dust devils, no overturned Conestogas blocking a lane. Fine. Might make it by nightfall, then.

The first few hours were uneventful, and gave me time to think. Things had advanced quite a bit since we first broke the sod nigh on 20 year ago. Elvira could do her business indoors now, instead of the little wooden house out back. I dug a well so we didn’t have to rely on the cistern. Next year I’d frame up the new house so we had wood for walls instead of sod, a real shingled roof. Right now the rain came, turned the roof to mud, and the satellite dish got outta true and lost the link.

“Jeb,” Elvira would say, “I was right in the middle of my stories and the cable went out again.”

Innit like a woman? ’Taint cable. We don’t have no fancy coaxial infrastructure out in these parts.

I have to confess I fell in t’ thinkin’ ‘bout what to do when I got myself to town. I was fixin’ to get the licenses rotogravured, and that was that. But it wouldn’t hurt to go to the Longhorn and sit a spell and maybe have a sarsaparilla, play some faro. I was there a year or so back and it did make an impression, those gals with the high-steppin’ dances up on the stage, showing their ankles off, endin’ the show with a flash of knee, all the menfolk hooting and hollerin’ and using Venmo to send ’em money.

I confess I was thinking about those gals so much I didn’t notice whether I was consistently dropping the “g” on my interior monologue, and also didn’t notice the storm that came up. Well, I’ve been through storms in this part of the country, and let me tell you, they come up without warnin’, and this one came up so fast there wasn’t even a notification on my watch. Folks out east think we only get rain or blizzards, but this was both rain and blizzards and small frogs, which really aren’t a problem ’cept when they spook the horses.

Sure enough, my horses Joe and Mika bolted, and I got thrown from the buggy. I got up and watched them run over the horizon. It’s moments like that a man takes stock, and draws on his inner reserves to carry on. I knelt, made a simple request of the Lord, then got up, brushed the mud off my pants, and walked over to the Holiday Inn. It was an Express, but any port in a storm.

The next morning I Ubered off to Bomfark. I ambulated down Front Street, tippin’ my hat to the men who sat in the shade, whittling or checking their Bitcoin wallet. I recognized one fellow and asked him where the Kinko’s might be. He spat on the ground, squinted up at the sky, and said, “It might be down on Oak Street. But chances are it ain’t.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Ain’t been no Kinko’s round these parts since they merged with FedEx years ago. Ain’t no Kinko’s anywhere. But say, you need some copyin’, I know a fellow, he can Kodak whatever you want and make a print.”

So I went to the studio, waited an hour while the fellow developed a picture of my license. He used flash powder to take the picture, and I worried that would blur out the barcode on the license, but it looked good. I guess I can vote now. Life’s hard out here, but we make do. Lord willin’, the creek don’t rise, and the 3D printer don’t run out of resin.