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Epilogue
Nick
Peyton, Pee Bee, and I were at the shop, trying to decide where to go to lunch.
“It’s Sunday,” Pee Bee said. “Nothing’s fucking open that’s good.”
“Pizza?” Peyton asked. “Haven’t had pizza in forever.”
“I’m not interested,” I said.
“Shit,” Pee Bee said, his voice a few octaves lower than normal.
“What?”
“Behind you,” he said. “Your fucking buddy.”
I turned around just in time to see the detective pull into the parking lot.
My asshole puckered at the thought of being arrested again, or being questioned in front of Peyton.
His car came to a stop beside us. He rolled his window down, and reached into the passenger seat. After turning around, he stuck his head out the window and grinned. “Can you read, Navarro?”
I nodded. “Comics and shit, yeah?”
He tossed me a newspaper. “Read that,” he said. “That right there? The front page? That’s good shit.”
“Peanut Butter, Navarro, Mrs. Price.” He nodded toward each of us as he said our names. “Have a nice day.”
He grinned and drove away.
I opened the paper, saw the headline, and made note of the reporter’s name. I looked at Peyton.
She shrugged.
And, I began to read.
* * *
A mother dies in a horrific car crash, leaving her children to be raised by an overworked father and an immigrant babysitter. No one cares, because there wasn’t a photo attached to the story of her death.
A pic or it didn’t happen.
If it bleeds, it sells. But that shouldn’t be the case. The world has changed. A best-selling love story will soon be a thing of the past. If it hasn’t happened yet, it’ll be here before you know it. The romance world has been turned on its ear by step-brother romances, slaughterotica, and priests with a penchant for girls.
It must be shocking, or it won’t sell. If it’s a tale of love, hatred – or anything in between – it doesn’t sell. And it won’t.
Be the first to pen a new way to have sex with a corpse, and you’ll hit the New York Times best-sellers list. Write a book about two people who fall in love, get married, and have triplets, and you’ll go broke.
Front page articles are used to sell the newspaper. The cover story. Lure them in at any and all costs. Write it long enough to require them to flip to two or three more pages, and you’ve done your job.
How does a journalist tell a tale of love and still capture the interest of the reader enough to provoke them to complete the story?
Make it a shocker.
Race. Color. Creed. Religion. In the eyes of the almighty, we’re equal and we should remain so, but we don’t. As a nation, we’ve been taught to judge. The world, in fact, has been taught to judge.
We tell ourselves we don’t, but we do.
