Essay Writer Godmother
Cream rises to the top
“If you let her talk, she’ll tell you tall tales,” my uncle would often warn us about our aunt’s otherworldly ability to create an epic story out of the most mundane occurrence.
After he died and her youngest son left for college, we encouraged her to write down her fables and send them in for publication.
She had a sizable vocabulary but “shy” and “modest” were not in it, and submitted several dozen articles. They would all be rejected for fundamentally the same reason: “we like the piece but we don’t publish essays, personal or creative.” After studying them we had to agree with the editors: even the most off-center tales smack read real life.
“Okay then, send them to essay editors.”
She didn’t need much convincing, and one by one each piece would be accepted, even by big hitters.
Part of her success was due to her ability to change her own personality on command. She first experimented with being a kinky 22-year old nurse who wants to play rough sex, preferably with the workers from the hospital’s morgue. The next one was a middle-aged traveling salesman, more or less the Willie Loman type, faithful to his wife and a good family man back home, who turns into a ravenous beaver hunter as soon as he gets on the road. The third type was her favorite: an old man spending his pension money on underage prostitutes in addition to being an animal lover in the most physical sense.
After identifying as one of the three characters in the first paragraph, a completely unrelated essay made up the rest of the piece. That created a dizzying fog for the readers who eventually caved in concluding that their minds had been stretched to new limits and, as a result, they’d developed a more open mind.
Refined people could not get enough of her articles. Sex sells; the magical first paragraph did the trick every time.
The few of us who knew her realized that in addition to seeing the world through a cockeyed lens, her true talent was that during writing she could fully convince herself that she was one of the three perverts.
In reality she was a lonely old woman who went to church every Sunday and once a month to confessional. Those poor priests!
Originally published at https://www.fridayflashfiction.com.
