Name a catastrophe and I’ll tell you about a group of people who tried to exploit it for personal gain. It is, simply, how the world works. Jobless thirty-year-old Failsons buying out toilet paper and hand sanitizer to resell it, corporations churning out corny ads about how “You will prevail as long as you buy the new Swiffer Sweeper Jet” two days after the virus hits, George Bush sending troops to Iraq after 9-11… But one group of people who always seem to be angling to profit off of disaster are writers, especially beginning ones who think they’re clever and deep. That’s why it came as little surprise to the editors of a local literary magazine when they received a couple pieces titled “Love in the Time of Corona.” However, things started to get weird real fast. Like the owl mail scene in the first Harry Potter, the emails started to pile up. Every other submission was “Love in the Time of Corona,” and they were all more or less tone deaf drivel about how it was “hard to see my boyfriend less” or, “body pillows have become my self care,” or overanalyzed and overwritten stuff about how “somebody at Trader Joes let me have the last greek yogurt and I really like greek yogurt.”
Said Violeta Sculpin, Junior, “It’s always so hard for me to think of titles and then suddenly, as if touched by the light of God, it came to me. And like, I’ve never read that Cholera book either. It just feels so good to produce writing that feels in conversation with the times, you know?”
According to the magazine, all of these titles will be deleted from their files.
