Review & Revenge

“Perhaps you could start my telling me why you killed him,” the detective said. The man in a suit looked around the room and shrugged seductively, licking his lips and nose.

“It all started many, many years ago. You see, I was a writer back then. I loved writing. I always wanted to write and do beautiful things and beautiful books,” he said, wistfully while swaying his head. “I always wanted to release 30 novels exactly, each one would be divided in categories of three: three horror-cream novels, three crow thrillers, three wood-n-ax-romances, three plays of plates, three plays about writing plays, three novels about a mall, three adventure novels, three WWIX novels, three broom erotic novels, three nail novels…”

“Wow!,” said the detective, thinking wistfully about how he also wanted to be a writer but was too smart, creative, gorgeous, popular, and interesting to do such a thing. “But… about the murder…”

“Oh, right. Well, you see. I was just starting my career and I was asked to write a short story about safety pin for Pilín Magazine and I was feeling so excited. My first towards stardom! But then… this awful, bitchy, disgusting piece of a man wrote and I quote: ‘A good idea, just not executed too properly. It seems to me that he has great potential, so I would be looking forward to reading more of him once he improves a little bit more.’ What blasphemy, I thought! Can you believe it? My writing was perfect as it was. How dare he say something about it?”

“Ok, ok. But… let’s see… how does this relate to you killing your husband?”

“Oh, well. After that loathsome, diabolical, Hitler-like review, I could certainly not keep on writing anymore. So, I decided to get revenge. I ‘bumped’ into him one day. My plan was easy: seduce him, make him fall in love with me, and then kill him. I did it. And here we are.”

“How long ago was this again?”

“Huh… like twenty years or so…”

The detective stroke his chin while the man looked on nervously.

“So, your plan was to wait twenty years?”

“Well, I guess I sort of forgot what I wanted to do or why I was so angry. I mean, he was great. I loved him. As it turns out, we had so much in common. He was funny, witty, beautiful, caring, adventurous, and all my friends and family loved him. We even had children… I mean, you saw them… while you were dragging me away, crying and screaming… but how we made them, that’s the secret I’ll never tell.”

“Of course, of course. Now, I’m trying to piece things together here…”

“Well, you see, we were about to make love after an entire day of nude seduction and he suddenly puts this newspaper out of all the archives he kept. And he said: ‘You know what this is? Here is where I wrote the review of your story. Do you remember? Do you remember? Do you remember?’ And then he laughed and he laughed and he laughed and then he was no longer laughing.”

“That seems overly exaggerated just for a bad review.”

“Well, he deserved it. I never ever wrote ever again because of that review. It destroyed my creative spirit.”

“What a lame excuse,” the detective said, smirking.

There was a pause in which the killer’s face turned pale, his eyes grew thinner, and his mouth opened, wide, wide, as if to swallow a big piece of watermelon.

“Oh, shut up.”