Your love is weird

Publishing under a pseudonymous name in the local newspaper, Myron Miscavage—whose real name was Barry Eck—had won himself modest acclaim by writing a weekly relationship advice column titled Weird Love. Barry’s writing, situated somewhere between inoffensively banal and offensively derivative, stuck to those popular phrases and easy consolations you might find in any other advice column, things like “if he wanted to, he would have” and “love begins by loving yourself”. His advice, equally uninspired, borrowed heavily from the therapy-speak, which was so easily repackaged for every occasion. But it wasn’t Barry’s prose that drew a growing crowd to the right-hand side of page forty of the Saturday morning paper. What set him apart were the strange lives of his correspondents, whose messages, in full, were published at the beginning of the weeks’ column. 

March 23, 2017 

Dear Myron 

My girlfriend owns a cat. He is the Prince of Darkness, Beelzebub himself, pure despotic evil manifested in the form of an undersized Bombay. I have been bitten, scratched, thrown up on, and pissed on more times than I can recall. Worst of all, he likes to watch. It doesn’t matter where or when, whether it be in the kitchen, the laundry, or the bedroom, when the door is locked, after I have checked under the bed, or in the cupboards; he always appears in the corner of my eye. My girlfriend won’t get rid of him; she is his eternal slave. Should I kill him? Can he be killed? May God have mercy on my soul, should I hire an exorcist? 

Your friend, Babylon is Fallen

November 10, 2017 

Mr Miscavage, 

Help! Christmas is coming up and I just know it’s going to be awkward seeing our extended family. Two years ago, we found out that my dad secretly impregnated me when I was nineteen, so it turns out my daughter, who just turned fourteen, is both my daughter and my sister! Crazy, right? Anyway, what would you recommend I do to cut through the ice this year? I was thinking about maybe introducing the family to a new boardgame, but I’m unsure. Last year mum wouldn’t stop crying! Thanks for the help. 

Best, Snakes and Ladders 

August 19, 2018 

Myron Miscavage, 

I’m a recently single 28-year-old man with a big problem. A couple months ago, I met sisters with conjoined Thoracopagus on a dating app. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy myself, but we really hit it off, it’s like making love to a woman-spider. For whatever reason (I can’t go into detail), we broke it off. I’ve been seeing people since, but I can’t seem to get erect. I’ve tried threesomes but it isn’t the same! Just my bad luck, it’s an incredibly rare condition (I’ve done my research). I’ve taken to waiting outside a clinic in my local state that specialises in conjoined Thoracopagus but haven’t had much success. What should I do? 

Kind regards, One in Fifty-Thousand 

The salaciousness of his correspondents’ lives, week in and week out, caused Barry’s star to rise, just as it caused scepticism in some of his readers. Barry was accused of inventing his strange correspondents, which annoyed him greatly. It annoyed him greatly because he had invented them. He had invented every single one. There was no voyeuristic cat, no secret insemination, no woman-spider. But how could they know that, thought Barry? What right did they have to doubt him? And with what evidence? The fact was that there could be no evidence. It was a perfect little scheme—the only people that could refute his columns were his correspondents, and his correspondents were his own musings, stowed away in his smug head. 

The scepticism was shared by the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, though it affected his calculus very little. The point, he understood, was for people to buy the paper. And they did. And as they read, maybe they would shamble an errant eye over pages fourteen, eighteen, thirty through to thirty-nine, or forty-one through to forty-five, on which, in their entirety, were piled various advertisements for bike shops and modern dining experiences and fake holidays and retirement security funds and law firms with names like Button Dunigan & Shoop. The editor-in-chief was told by one advertiser who organised fake holidays (though they objected strenuously to such characterisations inside and outside of court) that, since Weird Love had hit the press, they had sold so many fake holidays that they were considering moving into the business of real holidays. The ad dollars were in. Barry’s column was there to stay. 

Barry’s only problem was Kennel Reilly at the Local Tribune. Kennel, an investigative journalist, had begun an unfair and libellous smear campaign against Barry, publishing an article calling into question the veracity of Barry’s column, then, publishing a follow up article detailing an exhaustive investigation into the potential identities of his correspondents. It found, according to Kennel, a whole bunch of zero. The second article exasperatedly pointed out that the letter dated April 10, 2024, signed Snakes and Ladders, was just the twist in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. That one irked Barry the most. He loved that film. The second article also promised a third and final article in the series, a coup-de-tat against Myron Miscavage’s lascivious lies. Barry became an avid consumer of the Local Tribune, reading only for Kennel, and his hands often shook as he turned the pages, building to a more robust tremble whenever he caught sight of his dreaded byline. But it had been several months since the second article. A third had not yet appeared. Perhaps he had other innocents to torment, thought Barry. 

Kennel may have had the right end of the stick. But only at first. As is sometimes the case with these sorts of things, Barry’s popularity caused someone to take notice of him, and, soon enough, he received his first real letter. This should have come as more of a surprise to Barry, for he had never publicised his home address for the simple fact that he never considered that he would need to receive any letters in the first place. And although that curious thought may have played at the edges of his mind as he began to read the letter, it had all but disappeared by the time he had finished it.  

February 24, 2026

Dear Mr Myron Miscavage, 

I feel that you, and you alone, might understand me, and for that I love you. I have often felt misunderstood and unrepresented in the way that I love. But I have read your column often and have taken great heart in your kind advice. You don’t belittle your correspondents, who come to you as confused supplicants. Instead, you encourage them, you treat them with dignity sorely lacking in most. So, here I am, your confused supplicant. 

I have always loved to eat people. I know what I say may seem unnaturally evil but allow me to explain. When I say that I love to eat people, I mean more to say that I eat the people I love. Have you ever loved someone so much that you wished to climb inside their skin and bind yourself up in their very being? To become enmeshed. One. Complete. This is what eating someone you love is like. Eating someone is not like eating a sandwich, though you gain some small pleasure and satisfaction in the sandwich, the pleasures and satisfactions of a person are incomparable; the sandwich, no true referent for the person; the person, no true analogy for food. 

I say this all, not to convince you of the correctness of my love, but to demonstrate to you the sincerity of it, the honest particularness of it. Many would shame me. But their admonishment is not my confusion, the world is full of the small-minded and the wretchedly narrow, too compromised by their own moral guilt to allow for a greater display of love than a clammy touch of a hand or a half-meant word of affection. There is no courage among these, there is no honesty, not even to oneself, especially not to oneself. No, my confusion is that, even though I love courageously, I am not whole. Love is all consuming, but only for a time. I must have another and another still. One is not enough. Tell me, Myron, will I ever have enough? Will I ever feel whole? 

Love, Confused Supplicant 

He sat for a moment; letter limply indexed in his right hand. The walls of his study leaning in towards him. It ought to have been light—it was about midday—but the blinds were drawn, leaving only a couple stray darts of light to illuminate the heavy dust suspended in the air. In straining against the semi-dark as he read, his eyes had begun to ache and the lines on the page burnt white-hot indentations on his retina that sparked into existence every time he blinked, carrying with it a sense of unreality that he attempted to dismiss with a succession of rapid blinks. The bright lines expanded across the panorama of his vision until the room went entirely white. He could not breathe. Everything was white. Then, suddenly, the brightness subsided and the room was dark once again. 

The doorbell rang. 

Barry didn’t move. After thirty seconds, there was a sharp knock at the door. He shuffled, letter still in hand, out of his study and down the hall and to the door. He opened it. It was a man, about six-foot-nothing, with big shoulders and white socks in the gaps between his black shoes and black dress trousers. The face, which was appropriately broad given the size of the man’s shoulders and the whiteness of his socks, was familiar to Barry, although he had only seen it printed in the Local Tribune in a little square above Kennel Reilly’s byline. 

“Mr Eck?” he said, rather curtly. 

“Uh-huh”

“Mr Eck, we haven’t met before, my name is Kennel Reilly, I’m with the Local Tribune.”

Kennel waited a moment to see if Barry would say something. He continued. 

“Mr Eck, at this very moment a woman named Sadie Cross is being processed by the county police at Bulger Station, not three miles from here. Do you know this woman, Sadie Cross?”

This time he waited longer.

“Name doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry.”

“Mr Eck. Would it surprise you know that this woman, Sadie Cross, is perhaps one of the most prolific serial killers of the last decade,” Kennel paused to look down into Barry’s clutched hand, his eyes halting at the crumpled letter held tightly therein, “and an apparent correspondent of yours?” 

Barry was formulating the beginnings of a reply, but Kennel went on.

“Mr Eck,” he said, more solemnly now, “Sadie Cross was arrested just this morning outside an apartment complex in which she has found recent lodgings. Fulford Towers, Mr Eck—just down the street—I believe you know the one. I was told by a source of mine in the county police that she planned to come to your home, to seduce you, to kill you, and to eat you. Is this making much sense to you, Mr Eck?” 

“Unfortunately, it does. It’s all in here,” Barry flapped the letter at Kennel stupidly, as if what he said made all the sense in the world. 

“May I see the letter, Mr Eck?”

Barry passed him the letter. Kennel read it, drawing it up to his eyes and blinking deeply. In a minute, he was done, and he handed Barry back the letter. 

“I’ve seen such things before.” Kennel pursed his lips and smacked them rather dryly. “On a trip to Papua New Guinea for a paper, I met a man with Kuru. He was all shakes and shudders and jerks, like you were watching him walk through a dark room and the lights were being flicked on and off and on again. Happens when you eat human brain material, you see. A prion disease, I think they call it. Causes all sorts of problems. It’s like the body knew it wasn’t meant to be eaten, and it hid away a secret code, or a landmine, deep inside itself in the most important place. The final laugh after you’re already cooked and served on the platter; the dinner guests all get to die with you.” 

Barry barked a short, humourless laugh. 

“Is that what happened to her? Is she dying?” 

“Not yet, but soon enough. My source told me she’s already started to tremble. It’s somatic, for now. Maybe she’s already begun to hallucinate. That’s the last stage.” Kennel folded his arms and looked skyward. He seemed to ponder for a moment. 

“You’d better show the county police that letter,” he said.  

“Maybe I should,” said Barry, “But really, I’d rather not. It’s rather incriminating, don’t you think.”

“How so?”

“She said that I understood her, that she loved me.”

Kennel smiled. 

“I wouldn’t worry so much about all that, Barry.”

And with that, he spun on his heel and sauntered back out into the street, his enormous shoulders bobbing up and down like two great newel post caps bookending the balustrade of his back. 

“I recommend you purchase tomorrow’s Local Tribune, Mr Eck,” he shouted back as he went, “after today, I have to make some amendments.”  

Barry handed the letter in to the police. The flabby sergeant on duty, upon reading it for himself, had Barry promptly arrested. He was charged with obstruction of justice, concealment of a serious indictable offence, and accessory after the fact. Barry spent the night in lock up. Matters were only made worse in the morning. He was pulled into a small room in the back of the station. The sergeant brandished a paper in his face. It was the Local Tribune. 

“Miscavage Vindicated: Cannibal Correspondent Cooks Last Confit,” the sergeant read aloud, his marbled eyes pushing heavily against their slack sockets. 

“We’re having the boys pull all your columns out of storage. So far, it looks like 7 cases of criminal conspiracy, 120 cases of concealment, and 142 cases of accessory after the fact.” He spat the last few words, then crumpled into his chair, visibly weighed down, as if the charges were his own. 

Barry’s trial was short. Kennel Reilly was examined in the witness box. He seemed rather uncomfortable under questioning, almost as if he felt some part of the guilt. But his testimony was water-tight, or at least the judge thought so. 

“I considered it hogwash at first, the stories were just too fantastical, so I did some digging. Took me a while to find out Myron’s identity, did some snooping around Barry’s place, found a woman doing some snooping around too, saw her drop a letter in the letterbox. Barry showed me the letter, and I read it and I said to myself, I said my God, Kennel, it’s all true, they’re all real. Had to look at myself differently after that. Had to look at Barry differently. He may look like a sheepish idiot, your Honour, but deep down he’s sick. He’s all wrong.” 

Barry weakly protested the whole affair, he promised he was just a sheepish idiot. But it was a done deal, as many of these things are. The very people who could prove his innocence were people who had never existed, locked away inside his head. As the final judgement was handed down, he couldn’t help but listen to the sound of rushing blood in his ears, the sweep inside his flesh. He didn’t think of his sentence. He thought only of Sadie Cross. 

by Samuel Dickson