Filed on September 19, 2026
(Satire. Fiction. This is a fictional in-universe chronicle — no real HOA, Board, person, or throne. Entertainment only.)
Being a true and faithful account of the Chair, and of those who have held it, as recorded by the Covenant Hollow Homeowners Association and preserved, at great length, in a binder.
The Chair was not built for the Hollow. It was built for a bank — a regional savings institution with a golden name and a singular talent for closing. When the bank closed in 1998, its furniture was auctioned, and the Hollow bought one beige executive chair at a discount, along with a coffee machine and a flag that was, regrettably, too large for the pole.
For a time, the Chair was simply a chair. Its first occupant, Gordon McTavish, was a man of modesty who used it to read the minutes and would occasionally let others sit in it during intermissions. This was, historians agree, a mistake. It taught a generation that the Chair was a seat.
The second occupant, Marguerite O’Neal, understood better. She installed the chair with bolts. She was the one who said it aloud — “this is not a chair, it is a trust” — and she paid the taxman a small fine for the balcony from which she liked to watch the neighborhood.
The third occupant, Arthur P. Finch, is remembered for the Great Weed Edict and for the time he declared a single dandelion a “breach of the peace.” His tenure was short, not because he lost the Throne, but because he was, on the record, “impossible at a potluck.”
The fourth occupant held the Chair for a single, chaotic winter. She has since been removed from the records of the Hollow, though her name survives, faintly, on a name tag in a drawer in Room B.
The fifth occupant — the current dynasty — has held the Chair for eighteen years. It has not been a reign so much as a siege, each election a fresh attempt at the gates. They have weathered nine thousand vaguely worded amendments, two bleed-throughs of the mulch wars, and the slow, patient, folding formation of the pink opposition.
And still, the Chair sits. Beige. Wheel-locked. Scented, faintly, of old bank and boiled coffee. It does not make a man king. It makes a man the reason you cannot paint your shed.
The history of the Hollow is not written by the ones who win. It is written by the ones who stay past the potluck, straightening the folding chairs, and remembering, in perfect silence, that every throne is just a chair that people decided to fight over.