Prince of Peace

Historical fiction about Kimye, madness, and an angel who's also a fissure in spacetime

Thank you thank you thank you to all of you who’ve either signed up for paid subscriptions to the Cosmic Cheeto or who’ve upgraded your free subscriptions to paid! Your support has inspired me to trot out some of that finger-lickin’ good paid subscriber content.

Back in December, paid subscribers got to read “The Ministry of Comfort,” an unpublished short story of mine that’s very dear to my heart. If you haven’t checked it out already, you can here:

Now, I’ve got another treat for you: “The Prince of Peace,” a story that was cut from Bugsy before publication because of its surrealist depictions of certain potentially litigious mega-celebrities who may or may not be named Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. I wrote this story in 2019, when Kimye was still a thing, when Kanye was just teetering on the verge of the hair-raising free-fall he’s since plunged into, and when it seemed like Kim was maybe going to pursue a legal degree in order to free the wrongfully convicted. (Anyone remember that? Just me?) Suffice to say, things have changed a lot since then.

It feels strange to describe 2019 as a “simpler time,” strange and in many ways inaccurate, though it was certainly simpler for Ye, who seems to have played the various and highly scrutinized roles of madman, prophet, provocateur, holy fool and menace to society with more intensity in the intervening five years than he had since the 2009 VMAs¹. He’s gone from being the needle-moving rap genius everyone can agree on to grandiose self-appointed messiah to “polarizing figure” in possession of a self-polarizing diagnosis to awash in his own cringe-inducing bathos. Though Kim Kardashian’s path has been less theatrical, her reputation is no more laundered.

“Prince of Peace” starts with a thought experiment (What if the madman is actually a bona fide prophet?) and alternates points of view between an artist suspiciously similar to Ye and his reality star wife hard at work on her memoir. It’s a story about celebrity, gender, race, and mysticism, as well as the mysterious being-in of Kris Jenner.

I hope you enjoy!

Let the journey into the farthest reaches of your mind commence