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    You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories
    You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories
    You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories
    Ebook44 pages18 minutes

    You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories

    By Andrew Kozma

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    About this ebook

    You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories is a collection of weird, speculative fiction containing four stories dealing with the end of the world, both in terms of the death of the individual soul and the running down of the universe as a whole.

    The title story presents a woman who’s been murdered and still has a dinner party to prepare for. In “Teller of Tales,” a young girl must take on the responsibility of being the necessary conscience of her city. “Breach of Contract” describes the plight of an oil man who just wants to insure production quotas, but is roped into saving the world. Lastly, “The Trouble-Men” details what happens when a man trying to survive the end of the world meets up with those who are ending it.

    Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Drabblecast, Albedo One, Fantasy Scroll, and Daily Science Fiction. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award. His previous collection of short fiction is The Year of the Stolen Bicycle Tire and Other Stories.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAndrew Kozma
    Release dateFeb 8, 2016
    ISBN9781311677525
    You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories
    Author

    Andrew Kozma

    Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Albedo One, Interzone, Fantasy Scroll and Daily Science Fiction. His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Subtropics, Copper Nickel, and Best American Poetry 2015, and his book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award.

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      Book preview

      You Have Been Murdered and Other Stories - Andrew Kozma

      You Have Been Murdered

      & Other Stories

      By

      Andrew Kozma

      Table of Contents

      You Have Been Murdered

      Teller of Tales

      Breach of Contract

      The Trouble-Men

      About the Author

      Also by the Author

      Credits

      Copyright

      You Have Been Murdered

      You have been murdered.

      This you know, but you want to keep it on the down low.

      But it’s messy. It’s a mess. It being your body. Not to mention the clothes, the carpet (but you wanted to get rid of it anyway, reveal the nice hardwood beneath), the bloody footprints, handprints, and the decorative spattering now lacing the walls.

      You decide to paint the room red. You take all the plastic grocery bags you’ve been hoarding against Armageddon and a shortage of said-same and use them to dispose of the bloodied clothing, the cut-up carpet, and the bits of your flesh no super glue will hold back in place.

      It’s easy at first. The blood and gore is covered up and scrubbed from your body. The open wounds filled with putty and painted over with flesh-toned Clearasil. You’ve checked yourself in the full-length mirror and couldn’t tell that anything was wrong, even knowing where the wounds were. You had to poke them to prove to yourself that, yes, you had in fact been murdered. The prodding didn’t hurt so much as create a small mess, blood leaking through the putty and staining your dress, your favorite dress that you’d worn to give you confidence, now in a plastic bag with the rest of your life.

      Tonight is the party you’ve planned for months, and guests are already arriving. What can you say to them? I’ve been murdered. They fill the house with the incoherent noise and spastic movement of the living. You keep the upstairs securely locked. Your closest friend from childhood discretely mentions a smell. You put a roast in the oven. You take hamburgers from the freezer to defrost.

      You’re in the kitchen checking on food, your untouched beer on the spotless counter, when you notice the small group of people around you fall silent. Mark asks if you are alright.

      You have always hated him.

      There is a rough grinding as you straighten back up from looking through the oven’s window. The roast is doing fine, you say, but it is close to burning. Your smile causes everyone else to smile in return, in alleviation of awkwardness, even though

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