Hot or chopped

a short story

Dec 17, 2025

The summer the football player died I was six years deep into modeling for a variety of alternative clothing brands that preferred weird looking guys with disproportionate features and skimpy mustaches. I didn’t know the football player, hadn’t heard of him until very recently, though was always generally aware of football as a concept; men with tight asses run around chasing one another and are only allowed to touch each other in specific, divinely ordained ways, much like in real life. It was sad for some people that he’d died because he used to play very well which made him dependable in a way that life often was not and it was difficult to believe that talent and immortality were not spiritually inseparable, especially for these people who were generally talentless and fed on the talent of others to achieve a sense of living. It was less sad for other people who care about stuff, as the football player decided to do what all bored, grossly wealthy people who miss having power and public attention do, which was going into politics immediately after retiring his tight spandex to a glass case like a molted and preserved outer casing. His politics were pretty evil, though this only mattered for those whom his politics affected and even then it was like, really how does this not upset more people? He said at a press conference once, unprompted, that it would probably be a good thing if AIDS came back and then he was elected to congress, before that kind of rhetoric returned to vogue or maybe he was part of the reason it got popular again.

The football player had a son when he was 22 who emancipated himself 17 years later and spent much of the next decade of his life railing against his father’s politics and publicly decrying his status as all american good boy man. This son was the person who went to evaluate his father’s sprawling estate after he drowned in his pool on a biblical dose of painkillers, which unfortunately cannot fix two dozen concussions or conspiracy theorist tendencies but can definitely impair your ability to stay afloat in three feet of water. It was during this evaluation of the estate that the football player’s son found the boxes beneath boxes in the walk-in closet, the magazines, the clippings, vintage polaroids. Largely they were salacious, erotic, undoubtedly homosexual. The son shared pictures he snapped of all the paraphernalia on a soulless cesspit of mangled human grey matter called ‘the internet.’ The post was making the usual rounds; the liberals remarked how bigots were always closet freaks themselves, the bigots publicly said things about the situation so freaky you had to assume they found it erotic even though they were being quite serious.

But then one user on the big internet platform, who must have forgotten for a moment that he was human as were other people, pointed out that there were two photos in this box of lewdities that were not pornographic in nature. Just a guy with a wiry mustache in funny looking clothes. Someone in Argentina was able to crop and enhance the photographs, after which an argument began amongst millions of internet users, also known as citizens of the earth, as to whether or not these clipped photos were of the same person. The face on the man appeared almost exactly the same and yet in one of these photos the guy was unanimously regarded as ‘hot’ while in the other people agreed he was ‘chopped’ with ‘a bit of an incel vibe.’ It took only two more days for another genius of the world, who could have otherwise been doing surgery on child brains, to source these photos to their respective magazine publications and scan the pages they were pulled from to the internet, allowing millions of ravenous, bored, disaffected individuals steeped in cosmic loneliness to uncover my name under both images and begin a months long crusade to find out ‘is this guy hot or chopped.’ They were calling me Schrödinger’s Guy, as I was existing in a state of paradoxical hotness and ugliness until God held me up before them in my true form and revealed me for what I was. Only then would the lie burn away in righteous light and we would know once and for all what was real and we could dance in the streets about it, or at least find something else to argue with strangers about.

Now, the moment I saw my own face in that man’s porn box, before anyone made a case that it was worth caring about, I began my own crusade of scrubbing my existence from the internet like scum from the top of a lake. Every account decimated, every photo digitally burned, all semblance of a digital identity scattered to the pixel wind. I even paid a guy to plant fake rabbit holes and misleading links associated with my name all across the great wasteland of the web to lead them deeper into the nonsensical dark and away from me. I knew they’d find me anyhow. People who don’t know how lonely they are will mistake mass online psychosis for shared human connection and juice it for as much dopamine as its worth. The line of thinking seemed to follow: once I know if he’s hot or chopped, the sky will open up and the flaming sword will come down that will take my severed soul and weld it back together and then she’ll finally love me or god will love me or one billion strangers will love me for breaking the spell. As if anyone remembers the person who uncovered the definitive color of that dress, as if the truth ever stopped anyone from doubling down on their wrongness. That these lonely, halved humans might find me to quench a loneliness they did not understand was unkillable was only a matter of time. I had to move quickly.

Luckily, I had a whole network of guys in my line of work who look almost uncannily just like me so I summoned as many of these weird looking sexy guys as I could to hang around my house, on the porch or peering through the curtains, looking alternately hot and chopped depending on the angle, the light, the pop of a collar; we’re professionals after all and it’s a part of the work to know when to turn one aspect on and another off. It’s all acting. Being attractive is like playing house or Santa Claus, it’s not real but it’s comforting to believe it is.

When the many citizens of the earth started stalking my lawn and pointing their cameras from the bushes to capture the image that would right the world’s insanity, they were faced with this new paradox of being unable to identify which gangly sexy rodent man was me, while also believing, out of necessity I imagine, that they were all me. The internet quickly saturated with these new photos, seeding enough doubt and discourse that talk of me became less the point and my name was already hardly related to the football player anymore. People forgot about him really quite quickly, it was almost sad to watch. His seat in Congress had already been filled by a different retired athlete who looked just like him, nearly identical views as well. This method of suppression via confusion and redirection worked for a time and people started losing interest because the whole thing made them feel dumb and they hated feeling dumb, until a teenager breeding black mold in their lungs in a Colorado basement determined, factually and scientifically, with specific paranoid delusions cited in MLA format, that my house was a government facility cloning ‘rat boys’ to saturate the market and keep actual hot guys from getting laid (keeping the population ugly keeps the government in control he posited, which I can’t really argue with).

Things began to escalate from there. The black mold guy, without ever leaving his mother’s basement, garnered a solid following of believers who began not just stalking my lawn but throwing dead rats at the front door, making the standard heavy breathing phone calls and painting ‘clone scum, go back to where you came from’ in red paint on the sidewalk. My weird-looking hot coworkers had successfully and inextricably been roped into the situation by this new cloning theory and were quick to let me start positioning them at various windows of the house in rotating shifts so they could throw shit back at the intruders to scare them off, and they even seemed to blindly agree to all of this as though we shared the same line of thinking, the only way out is through, holding one another’s gangly hands slotted perfectly into the other. Unfortunately, this only further piqued the interest of earth citizens as it began to appear that we were trying really hard to hide and defend the government facility in the basement–people on the big internet platform threads swore they could see strange flashing lights emanating through the tiny fogged up windows and alleged that they were counting more and more of these chopped hot guys with each passing day even though no one came in or out of the house.

That’s when the break-ins started. Windows shattering in the night, flaming bags of shit in the yard, untraceable death threats delivered via email, text and carrier pigeon, viral pathogens also delivered via carrier pigeon. A knife flashing in the dark pressed to my throat or the throat of someone who looks just like me. It was almost heartening to see the citizens of the earth unified about something and gathering in the real world to take action about it, even if it was personally a bit of an inconvenience to me. I could not be so easily daunted, I’m built to survive however possible, it’s just the way I am. It brought me no pleasure, however, to hear the cesspit threads whispering of an imminent large scale siege which I would be forced to defend myself against at all costs. In the daylight, me and these spare bodies worked tirelessly to erect a fence, wreathed it in barbed wire, floodlights trained on all potential entry points. We stockpiled food, canned goods, oats and nutrient dense granola bars. One of my guys was, serendipitously, a dealer of firearms and the like. Sipping beige protein smoothies over the cleared dining room table, I or someone much like me, laid down a stretch of sketch paper and we mapped out a game plan, x’s and o’s, dotted lines, strategies and backup strategies. When they came, I would be ready.

At a deep hour of the smudged and recalcitrant night when it seemed the day might never return, the attack began. The fences rattled. Thick blankets draped the barbed wire and bodies clamored over clad in bulky and unbecoming battle gear. They hit the ground running. From up in the high window of the attic, I trained my rifle and pulled the trigger without much feeling. I lit molotovs and arced them through the iron bars on the dining room window. I barricaded the door to the basement with my back to the thick steel and my finger on a little red button as a last resort. The battle was waged violent and nearly evenly matched. These citizens of the earth were formidable. Their blood spilled red and mine spilled gray. It seemed for most of the night that we might prevail; we were playing well and dirty with everything to lose, but there were no rules to this game of war. They took a bulldozer to my fence. They flooded the yard with hissing tear gas canisters. They swept across the lawn in gas masks and kevlar like matching uniforms. There was no stopping them. The thirst for knowledge was too great, they had to know: was I chopped or hot. Was I man or clone. Was the world the way it is or something else entirely.

I fought well and it saddened me to cede hope but I was outmatched in my current state. In the end I was left little choice but to watch from the high hill overlooking my neighborhood as the citizens of the earth overtook the house sometime just before dawn. It was terribly tragic how many of me had to stay behind. I flinched as I am not often wont to do when I pressed that little red button in the basement and the whole house went up in roaring flames and plywood scattering like confetti.

I burned a dozen times over with the wooden structure and those citizens of earth on the quest for truth. But they would not find it here. The whole wreckage of my home collapsed inward, down into the basement with all of my other bodies burning and the vat that they spawned from too. Was I hot, was I chopped, was I a government project, they’d never know. My strategies would change, trails would go cold, within days there would be a mean woman to get mad at or new invented enemies to chase to the end of loneliness. I lose battles but I win wars. They’ll build no statues of me but they’ll catch glimpses of me—on the street, in the background of a movie, on a dating app with a checkmark by one of my names—and say to their friend ‘holy shit, isn’t that the hot or chopped guy’ and their friend will say ‘everyone looks like that now, dude. It’s just some guy.’

Why the football player clipped me out of the magazines, I suppose I’ll never know for certain. But I do believe he was amassing evidence. I believe he went into politics with the intention of obtaining power with which to root me out and weed my operation from the very earth. I amassed some evidence of his plotting as well, just enough. He left me no choice but to press his fat, concussed head down in that chlorine vat until his tight ass stopped squirming. If I’d known about the clipped photos then–well, there’s no going backward. His son started a stink in a cesspit and I fought the stink with all my might but it was drawn to its inevitable conclusion with many dead and a phenomena left to fizzle out unceremoniously. Or maybe the football player just thought I was hot.

From the high hill, I watched one of my many homes burn with the livening orange of a new day. A small price to pay for life everlasting. And the people wouldn’t be able to argue any longer anyhow; those smoldering bodies with the burning flesh clinging to the blackened bones were certainly hot and decidedly chopped. There would be no answer. Only more of me.