Eleven Signs You Are Losing the Throne

Filed on September 19, 2026

(Satire. Fiction. No real HOA, Board, person, or throne — only the idea of a neighborhood that is definitely not this one. Entertainment only.)

The Coven does not give advice. It issues findings. That said, the following are the Eleven Plainly Visible Signs that a sitting Board President is losing the Throne, compiled for the good of the Hollow and read, regrettably, aloud.

1. People stop signing the attendance sheet. When they sign, they use a pen that is not the Board’s pen, which is a pointless act of defiance that somehow works.
2. Your own enforcement volunteers start photographing your garden. If The Coven has begun a file on its own President, the Throne is already wobbling.
3. Rooms fall quiet when you walk in — and not the respectful quiet. The quiet that precedes the motion to table.
4. Someone in House Flamingo refers to you as “the former President” before the election. This is not a mistake. This is a spoiler.
5. The minutes become a weapon. When your own “Mintues” — as the office spells it, always with original error — start getting “corrections” submitted from the back row, history is being written against you.
6. A single lawn on Sempergreen Way outflanks your fine schedule by a margin of exactly one flamingo. You cannot see the win you are losing.
7. You have had to call three emergency sessions about mulch. The management of a revolt is no longer the job; the revolt is the job.
8. The Garden Walk passes by your house twice. House Rose does not walk twice out of admiration.
9. Your cookie supply at the February meeting has been independently verified and found wanting. In the Hollow, a thin cookie tray is a declaration of weakness.
10. You begin to think about the Chair in the way you think about a wound — present, persistent, and absolutely not to be touched.
11. You were not informed of the rebellion. You were, as they say, the last to know — and you know it because you read it in the minutes they wrote about you.

The Coven notes, for the record, that none of this is advice. It is simply what a losing regime looks like, from the inside of the room that has stopped echoing.