“I told the truth.”
“She missed that dinner. She missed every dinner, every meal. After a year she stopped eating altogether. By the time we realized it, she was... We took her to therapy, to nutritionists, brain specialists, eating coaches... Nothing worked. Her hair fell out, her teeth. By the time she was sixteen years old, she weighed sixty-eight pounds. She went into a coma. She died five months before her seventeenth birthday...” Kevin felt a rush of heat into his eyes, his arms, his fists, as if all the hate in his body — endless reserves of it — was racing to the surface, racing there to beat these awful truths. He wanted to sock Ledbetter in the face. He wanted to break her jaw, to stop her from talking forever. But he took a step back, breathed. She would live down here for a very long time, but he would never touch her again. That was part of the plan. He had to stick to the plan.
“I’m not naturally thin,” she was saying, her voice a growl under the burlap. “I watch myself. I have discipline. I have restraint...”
Back at Cumberland Farms, Kevin had, at duty’s urging, taken a Twinkie from the Hostess display. It was still in his pocket — a keepsake from an earlier time of day. As Sarah Jane Ledbetter continued to talk — about diet and exercise, about the power of self-control — Kevin removed the Twinkie from his pocket. He placed it atop the pile that lined the cell — three years’ worth of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Yodels, Cupcakes, Snowballs, Ring Dings, fruit pies, Little Debbie cakes and Streusel Swirls and countless other prepackaged desserts, not to mention cases and cases of Coke and orange soda, all of it filled with preservatives, with empty calories and refined sugar and synthetic fluff. Food that fattened but didn’t nurture. Food that never went bad. “My daily treat,” he would tell Chuy, when, upon ending his shift, he took one of the bright bundles from the display. “It makes me happy to bring one home.” He hadn’t been lying. There were now over a thousand prepackaged desserts in this cell, climbing the walls, spilling onto the floor. In some places, the pile stood seven feet high.
“What are you going to do to me?” Sarah Jane Ledbetter said.
Kevin undid the duct tape around her hands. He removed the sack from her head and exited the cell, locking it as she stood there, gaping at her surroundings.
“Why... why did you put all this... stuff in here with me?”
Kevin looked at her. “Because you aren’t naturally thin. And eventually, you will get hungry.”
Ledbetter stared at him, her eyes widening, changing. She understood now, Kevin saw. She knew exactly what would happen to her in a week, in a month, in a year. She caught sight of the two enormous mirrors across the room and shrieked, “You can’t do this!”
“See you in two years.”
Kevin turned away from her and headed for the cellar stairs, his shoes scuffing the concrete floor, her screams hurtling after him, desperate as the screams of a child. “You’re a monster! You’re insane! You can’t do this to me, I’ll kill you!”
Self-restraint, he thought.
Kevin climbed the stairs one by one, hoping that his home improvements had worked. She was much louder than he thought she’d be — all that sound coming out of such a spindly body. Who would have thought?
The instant he closed and locked the door, though, the screams evaporated into the soundproofing tiles. It worked, Kevin thought. It all worked. The house was silent once again, and Sarah Jane Ledbetter was nothing more than a bad memory, locked away, growing larger.
Alternative Medicine
by Marilyn Todd
The Jacket Blurbs Puzzle
by Jon L. Breen
Jon L. Breen is known to all longtime EQMM readers for the thirty years he served as the regular reviewer for our book-review column The Jury Box. He still contributes two columns per year to that department, but he has more time now to devote to fiction-writing. The California author is a critically acclaimed novelist; this new short story is a sequel to his February 2007 EQMM tale “The Missing Elevator Puzzle,” which received a nomination for that year’s Barry Award.
Ask not my words for jacket flaps,
Flapping in the breeze;
I’d rather recite urban raps
In my BVDs.
In my life I’ve had my claps,
Although I know I’ve sinned,
But writing blurbs for jacket flaps
Is public breaking wind.
The Tuesday before the murder at Worden University’s Conference on Bestselling Fiction found Stephen Fenbush in the campus bookstore browsing among a display of the conferees’ books. It was a crisp I December morning, with a prospect of snow for the weekend, and Stephen was so happily settled into his position as Film Critic in Residence, he had begun to wish the appointment lasted more than one year.
Of the five participants in the bestseller conference, two were members of the Worden faculty: the English Department’s Cosmo McDougall, who had made the New York Times list with four or five political suspense novels, and Amos Bosworth, the physics professor whose first novel, a techno-thriller in the Tom Clancy tradition, had made a splash almost commensurate with the big push it had received from his publisher. The other three represented disparate categories of popular fiction: Callie Jackson had made an industry of the Hollywood roman à clef; Gresham Turnbow was a leading practitioner of legal thrillers; and Muriel Bates had found a niche in romance both historical and contemporary.
A young female student was systematically picking up a book from each pile, reading from a few pages at random, making disparaging clucks and disdainful gasps. Finally, she looked up and said to Stephen, “They’re all terrible, aren’t they? Can’t anybody on the bestseller list write at all?”
“Oh, most of them can,” Stephen said with the wisdom of almost four decades on earth. “But it’s not a requirement.”
“You’re Mr. Fenbush, aren’t you? The film critic?”
“Guilty.”
“Hi, I’m Willy Ames. That’s short for Williametta.” She offered a hand for shaking. “I’m looking forward to attending your silent-classics series. I’m so glad you’re not doing only the comedies, though some would say that is a brave decision.”