Daniel Hutchinson From The Hutch

Whew – we've elected our leaders for the next three years.

And, to be honest, I'm glad that's over.

What a weird experience.

It started the day before Election Day – which is also an election day – in a pop up voting place, on a street with a name I can't remember.

Feeling good about the day and the act I'm about to commit, I march boldly into the building to be met by a large bottle of hand sanitiser and a small person.

The expectation is clear.

The common good takes priority over personal preference.

Small, piercing eyes watch as I slather the gooey, fragrant concoction on my hands.

Then, I grab a pen. Too hasty, wrong bucket, dammit.

Why do you even need a used-pens bucket? I look again and inside is a motley collection of broken pens. Some look to have been chewed in half by a pitbull.

There's hair and what looks to be a fingernail and a torn off piece of checked shirt. Oh my God!

You are very happy

But there's no time to dwell. The voters behind are impatient to do their duty. Maybe I imagined it.

So I thoroughly slather again and grab a new pen from the appropriate container, avoiding the piercing eyes.

My hands are drunk and sticky from a double dose of hand sanitiser but I'm exactly one metre behind a fellow voter so all is good. Good citizens all of us.

You can't sniff the mood in the room.

Everyone smells like flowers.

Everyone's eyes are slightly glazed.

Everyone speaks slowly and hums the worker's song. Everyone is on the same page. The election worker behind the desk smiles knowingly, utters a string of questions and asks me to repeat the information on the card.

'What's your name?”

'Where do you live?”

'You love Jacinda.”

Did he really say that last one? Did he?

God I'm woozy. Damn that hand sanitiser. Red balloons are flashing in my peripheral vision.

The smell of chamomile and something I can't quite place, fills my nostrils as the clerk slowly folds sheets of paper. His eyes never leave me but still, the creases in the paper are perfect.

How did he do that? Perfect execution.

Perfect performance. 'Perfect handling of a pandemic.”

'Who said that?”

Come out, damned spot

The next few minutes are a blur. I can't walk straight and bump into the wall on the left. I clutch my pen hard in the right but it wants to go left. Over correcting I swing to the right and hit the side of the booth before aiming for something in the middle. Then I'm marching towards the exit, clutching my pen tightly.

What do I do with the pen? Damn it - there's the bin for used pens.

A man in a Swanndri is having the same problem except he's shaking with anxiety.

'What do I do with the pen?” he bellows.

'You keep the pen, my friend – it's your pen now. Single use plastics are bad. Your germs. Nobody is going to use it ever again.

'Think of the dolphins. Take it,” I tell him. The pen shatters in a grip made powerful from drenching thousands of sheep. He shoves the mangled thing in the used pens bin and runs for the door, sprinting blindly across the bustling road, fumbling his keys before slamming himself inside the cab of the ute.

Over the barking of sheep dogs in the back you can hear him shouting and rubbing his hands – ‘What have I done!''

Peering in the cab the poor man is staring at his hands in disbelief. They are covered in ink and right in the centre, is what appears to be an image of Mother Theresa.

Or is that Jacinda?

After the ambulance has left, I climb back into my own vehicle and turn on the radio.

My hands have dried, my head is throbbing and I try to make sense of the whole thing.

A street with no name

All night I have visions of landslides, of thick red mud that smells of chamomile and it's not Mother Theresa who emerges from the mud but Badjelly the Witch.

'What have you done? What have you done?” she cackles over and over again.

So the next day I head back to the voting place only to find it's empty. The windows have been covered over with paper so you can't see inside.

This is an advance voting place, not an Election Day venue. The signs are gone.

It's just empty, in a street with no name.

Around the back, flattened boxes hold the only clue that anything happened here. On the bottom of the boxes, in one corner is tiny Cyrillic writing and what appears to be a chamomile leaf.

Then it all makes sense – the Russians have tampered with the election sanitiser!

But it's too late to warn anyone.

By 8pm that night the politicians have turned into poets and people party into the night. Most drink to celebrate but many drink to forget.

There's a sweet smell in the air as election parties drift into the wee small hours, fuelled by a common desire to dance in the same direction and a healthy dose of official election hand sanitiser.

daniel@thesun.co.nz