10 Ways I Will Be Murdered
By Liz Galvao
1. Running in the park by myself. My assailant will immediately be able to tell that I am barely propelling my body forward as it is, and could not run away faster even if my life literally depended on it. My disproportionately heavy breathing during light to moderate cardio will leave me unable to scream for help. He will roll my body into a ditch, and it will be found by a French bulldog who did twice as many miles as I did.
2. Walking past a white van with no windows. This is a given. I will be shoved into the back of the van and then held hostage in a basement for nine years, during which time I will not do anything useful, like learn a language or get a head start on my memoirs. I will not even lose any weight.
3. Taking a shower alone in my apartment on a summer night when I left the window open. Obviously, a murderer will climb up on the fire escape, and breezily make his way into my apartment. He will see how many books of personal essays by female comedians I own, and will strangle me immediately with my shower curtain.
4. Walking to my car in a parking garage at night. This is a freebie. It’s like, why did I even go to the Target if I didn’t want to get clubbed over the head with a crowbar in the three-tier parking garage? He will shove me in the trunk of my own car, and I’ll suffocate on all the reusable bags I forgot to bring into the store.
5. Taking a cab by myself late at night and kind of drunk. The cab driver almost doesn’t want to kill me, because it’s too easy and it makes him feel cheap, but ultimately my hiccups and erratic Instagram browsing will drive him into a murderous rage. Going over a bridge, he’ll toss my body out the window like an old McDonald’s bag, followed by an old McDonald’s bag.
6. Using the bathroom at a quiet rest stop. Honestly, what was I thinking? Why don’t I just drag myself into the woods? I’ll end up chained up in a remote cabin, where an inbred family of cannibals will take turns making fun of my blog’s Google Analytics.
7. In a back aisle of the Home Depot. This makes perfect sense; everything in the store has at one point been used to either commit or clean up a murder. Sunrise, sunset. It’s your one-stop murder shop, and I had no business being there.
8. Walking past an open mechanic’s garage. Filled with anger at my showboating pedestrian ways, the mechanic will beat me over the head with a wrench, drag me into the caverns of his garage, and overcharge me for a straightforward tire rotation. All businesses with cement floors are murder places.
9. Coming out of a Planned Parenthood. Despite passing through a metal detector and bulletproof glass on my way in to buy birth control, after exiting the building I will be instantly slapped to death with the penises of pro-life male activists. “You premurdered
a nonexistent child!” they will shriek. “How could you?”
10. Camping. I have never been camping, but I imagine that camping is to murder what preheating your oven is to making a frozen pizza. You are basically warming yourself up to be stabbed in a tent and have bears tear apart your body looking for snacks. My corpse will be found by a motley group of teenage boys just on the verge of outgrowing their friendship, and it won’t even be a formative experience for them.
Illustrations by Katie Tandy.
