Dictator in a Bottle

A Short Story by Jessie Seigel / Washington, D.C.

To round out this year of political upheavals, I’d like to offer Insider readers my short story, “Dictator in a Bottle.” It was first published in Unlikely Stories Mark V in December 2024. Perhaps it can provide a brief, whimsical catharsis for the madness that has been 2025.

Welcome. By your weary look, you have come a long way. So, sit. Have a cup of tea.

Now. You say a despot is threatening your country.  And you have heard rumors that I, a wise old woman, can help. Perhaps I can.

For a while, my own country was threatened by a would-be dictator. Ours ran about like a crazy man, bullying everyone who came across his path.

He wielded a magic weapon of loud, uncouth words—outshouting, out-mocking, and out-taunting any who opposed him. If a challenger were bald, he became “a bowling ball on stilts.” If a man had a lisp or a stutter, our bully snorted at him and flicked a wrist.

Even our military heroes were not immune. Heroism was belittled and twisted, magically, into cowardice.

The crowds who came to watch this bully’s antics were a mixture of those who like a circus and the sort who would enjoy a good hanging if one were available.

Those of our leaders who believe in democracy were too busy being noble and above the fray to respond to the bully’s antics. They ignored him. And so, he grew.

Some of his power-hungry competitors tried to react. But their counterattacks were low and mumbling. When he roared back at them, those challengers folded up as flat as hospital bed sheets and turned twice as white in the face. They would not work together against him, and they could not withstand him alone.

So, they shrank and he grew some more. Finally, our would-be dictator grew so large that his britches burst at the seams. His huge head hovered over us like the Goodyear Blimp. His mouth became a black, gaping maw ready to swallow us up and spit out our bones—even the bones of his blindly faithful acolytes—though they could not see it.

Ahh, you ask—if public and powerful personages could not quell him, and his followers remained faithful, what could I, an anonymous old woman do about him?

I was taught young to stand up to bullies. Unlike those weak-kneed worthies, if I had to stand alone against them, I learned to take pride in standing alone. My mother taught me this. She also taught me the kind of words needed to cut tyrants down to size.

So, I sought out our would-be despot. I found him churning up a crowd in a huge tent set up just for him at a public fair. I angled my way to the front and managed to ascend to the stage. No one pays attention to an old woman, so his guards did not stop me.

But he saw me. Instinct must have told him why I was there because he immediately shouted: “What are you doing up here, you old bag of bones? Get out of here!”

I replied, “I’m on to you, you bag of wind.”

He called me fat and toothless.

Showing every one of my sharp teeth, I called out: “Is that all you’ve got? All you’ve got is to call people names because you’ve got nothing else. Well, anybody can do that!" Then, to demonstrate, I called out to him: “You fart from the mouth every time you open it.”

“You!” he cried, “You are disgusting. Your face is one big wrinkle, and your hair is as stringy as spaghetti. No one wants to hear what comes from your mouth!”

I brought forth my fiercest weapon then, cruel truths amplified to infinity. Never mind physical imperfections. I hit him with phrases that exposed every wrinkle, blemish, flab and flaw of his soul and psyche.

I shouted, loud enough for his crowd to hear, “You are a worthless, pathetic excuse for a human being who has done nothing worthwhile in this world. Clearly, you are trying to compensate because your mother never loved you and your father held you in disdain. It does not matter how much power you acquire, you will still be nothing more than a pimple on the backside of mankind. A mote in the eye of the universe. Because nothing you value is of any worth.”

Those words were cruel, but such a litany is necessary when an aspiring tyrant has reached this bloated stage.

My words went through the man like a pin through the skin of a balloon. He bounced off the tent’s canvas walls, the air whooshing out of him as he tried to outshout me. “I am famous and feared, and you are nothing,” he sputtered. “What have you ever done? Who even knows your name?”

I replied, quietly now, “I do not need anyone to know my name because I know who I am.” And I continued my incantations until he deflated completely, his rants becoming mere mouse-like squeaks and his size small enough for me to lift him by his teeny lapels and pop him into a little bell-shaped bottle which I sealed with a cork stopper. Then I quickly descended the stage and disappeared into the night. Those attending were too astonished by this spectacle to stop me.

What did I do with him?

I took him home. I keep this tiny creature in his jar on a shelf in my back shed. The cork has tiny holes in it sufficient to keep him from suffocating—I’m not a murderer! —but the holes are not large enough to allow much sound to escape. There’s no heat in the shed, but the hot air from his breath as he shouts keeps him warm enough.

You wish me to take you into my shed and show you the bottle? So, you can see the proof of what I’ve said for yourself?

No, I cannot do that. You see, the glass only muffles the sound of him somewhat and the arrival of any audience encourages him to strut and shout all the more. And that eggs on the others in my collection to do the same.

Oh, yes. I have a collection of dictators and would-be dictators.

The presence of an audience can get any of them agitated, and then they all get going with their strutting and loud speeches. That is perilous. Their hot air creates steam. If enough steam accumulates, its pressure pops their corks, and they escape. Even apart from the steam, when they get agitated, they knock around in those bottles, rock them from the inside, charge the glass until the bottles fall off the shelf, hit the ground, and break. Then they run around the floor, puffing themselves up, and before you know it, I’ve got numerous full-size maniacal egomaniacs I must shrink again to prevent the entire collection from being–all of them at once–unleashed upon the world.

For a fee, I could give you a packet of my incantations. But of course, you will need to find someone with the backbone and lungs to use them.

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Jessie Seigel’s journalistic career began with the political Washington Whispers column, written for The Insider. Since The Insider ended its run in 2023, Seigel has continued the column as My Washington Whispers,

www.mywashingtonwhispers.com. In addition, Seigel has had a long career as a government attorney, has received two Artist’s Fellowships from the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities for her fiction, has been a finalist for several literary awards, and has had two professional staged readings of her play Tinker's Damn, with another play, The Three Jessies. More on Seigel can be found at https://www.jessieseigel.com.