Sweet Smell of Death

by Michael Bryson

The chalk remained the next day, faded, smudged. Poorly edited, Cindy couldn’t help remarking to Suzanne, who’d coerced her into attending "the scene of the crime."

"What crime?" Cindy had asked. "He jumped."

Suzanne didn’t agree. No one as confident in his own opinions would need the solace of freshly laid asphalt.

"You think he was pushed?"

Suzanne shrugged. She’d had a crush on the critic, Cindy knew. Suzanne’s slim debut volume of poems was due out the following month, and she’d sent him a copy of the proofs, a pair of soiled undies, and a perfumed card.

"Do you want to get laid or reviewed?" Cindy had asked.

Suzanne replied, "What’s the difference?"

Now they stood over the spot where he’d died. A large death, not a little one. Cindy didn’t understand book people. Especially poets. Why did they hate each other so? Did it all go back to their mothers? Why couldn’t they punctuate or use capital letters?

Cindy imagined the critic on his balcony, wine glass in one hand, Suzanne’s manuscript in the other. The blogosphere had already confirmed the details. Her underwear stuffed under his belt. Her manuscript dispersed across the area. The perfumed card hadn’t turned up.

It wasn’t until days later, when the police came knocking, that Suzanne confessed. Her emails were all over his computer. So, too, was his sharp dismissal of her talent.

"He was allergic, how did you know that?" the solemn police sergeant wanted to know, but Suzanne just smiled.

"Environmental sensitivities," she told Cindy when her friend visited her the following month in custody. "He wouldn’t have been a good critic without them."

Our Needs at This Time

by K. D. Miller

Though your work shows merit, it does not suit our needs at this time.
Okay. Okay. I’m a big kid. I can handle this. God knows, I’ve handled it before. Lots of times. You should see my walls. All of them. Kitchen. Bathroom. (Not the shower, though. Tried it. Papier maché plugging the drain.) But everywhere else. Inside the closets. Right down to the baseboard. When I ran out of wall space, I started putting them in photo albums – the kind with the sticky peel-back plastic. Got whole shelves full of those. Could show them to you, if you came over some time. Would you like that? To come over? You could, you know. Not like you don’t know my address.

Okay. Okay. Consider yourself invited. Or yourselves. You do say our needs. I can just see you all. Sitting around a big table. Maybe in robes with hoods. One of you reads aloud a paragraph, or maybe just a sentence, or maybe just a single word of my work as you call it. Then the leader chants, “Does this meet our needs at this time?” And the rest chant back, “No, it does not meet our needs at this time.” Then one little guy, a castrato they keep just for the purpose, pipes, “Though it shows merit.”
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is just one of you. And you’re using the royal our. Or the divine. Sure. Because that’s who you think you are, isn’t it? God! Fucking God! And that’s why it’s always all about your needs! Because it’s not as if I have any needs of my own! Is it? Of course not!

Sorry. Sorry. It’s just that little cushiony clause: though your work shows merit. It kind of gets to me sometimes. I mean, is it supposed to make my day? Make me feel like at least I’m getting E for effort? Why don’t you just say what you mean, you asshole or assholes – Nice try, sucker, but no cigar.

Sorry. Sorry. I think where this is coming from is that I got your latest today, and I have no place to put it. Even the floors are completely covered. The ceilings. The doors. Windows. Furniture. I suppose I’m just going to have to turn into one of those people you read about sometimes in the paper. You know – the ones who collect stacks and stacks of newspapers or bills, or in my case, rejection slips, and one day the stacks collapse on them and they smother and their cat eats them.

Except I don’t have a cat.

I meant that about coming over some time.

And I’m sorry I called you an asshole.

Or assholes.

No one would suspect the publishing world of murder....

A baseball-capped, bat-eared, tuberous Claymore resident was being interviewed. Chellis turned up the sound to hear him imputing the crime to a) terrorists, b) street gangs from Farclas (ha ha–at least we have streets), c) the baby-killing, pro-choice contingent, and d) his mother-in-law. Using the discordant conjunctions of the sub-literate–like, ya know, get it?–the guy was gumming together these stray strands of conspiracy theory into a single nut cluster. Chellis was placing his bets on the mother-in-law. Witches were once very useful for this sort of thing, but they’d gone out of fashion. No one would suspect the publishing world, barricaded behind their mountainous slush piles, of bumping someone off, but for all anyone knew, their office life could be as vicious as that of academe. Besides, murder required some competence, didn’t it? (Mrs. H frequently vented on the subject of publishing screw-ups.)

-- From Terry Griggs's Thought You Were Dead