Ed. note: We received this 55 Fiction story on July 29. While it missed the deadline for this year’s contest, and was thereby on its way to the pile for 2014’s contenders, a closer read revealed it to be a response to August Salemi’s July 18 letter to the editor (“Tell us how you really feel, August!”) criticizing this year’s winners:
August awoke with the same scowl that graced his face when he went to bed the night before. He sat down with a cup of bitter brew and the New Times. Halfway through the paper he smiled, at last something he could publicly pooh-pooh. He reached for his thesaurus. “When I first read the compendium … .”
This article appears in Aug 1-8, 2013.