The following was found scrawled in blood on a wall outside The Weekly’s offices, with a postscript urging us to publish the piece if we had any concern for the consistency of our wifi signal.
In the wee hours of this past Thursday morning, it was reported that McGall Weekly contributor and U3 Bullshit Semiotics major Mathilda Cesarina Quimms died of mysterious causes in her apartment. Experts expect someone will get around to caring by Wednesday? Thursday maybe? They dunno, dude, there are a lot of midterms this week, stop being such a drama queen. Suspected cause of death is suffocation via a crushing Sisyphian weight comprised of the workload associated with earning an undergraduate Arts degree and the accompanying quiet terror of knowing said work may not, in fact, be a simple stumbling block on the road to immortal fame and renown.
Quimms was also beginning to doubt her long-held belief that her body held the reincarnated souls of both Dorothy Parker and Catherine de Medici, a state far from optimal for one such as herself, who survived entirely on a diet of cosmic narcissism and sometimes Kraft dinner.
The Weekly was lucky enough to grab a word with Quimms on her way up to the Dark Door in the Sky. Banging together a couple of soda cans in lieu of rattling chains, the deceased was luminous with the glowing radiant clarity of the Great Beyond. The effect may have been enhanced if she’d had a chance to get an old-fashioned white nightgown or something, but the subject was in a hurry and we must be forgiving.
“It just really saddens me that such an important body of work as the one I produced is just going to be lost in the slipstream of time, you know? Remember that one time I wrote an exposé on those two students in the History department? Who were, like, being assholes? That was some hard-hitting shit right there. I mean, people didn’t really talk or tweet about it, but I could feel a sort of shift on campus, you know? People were awake. In a way they hadn’t been before. I did that.”
Quimms declined further comment after this dubious statement, disposed of her soda cans, and continued her journey upwards into the unknowable. She intends to keep her Twitter feed active via photoplasmic patch through the Veil of Worlds.
If the living Quimms is remembered at all, it will probably be for that time that she and her spoken word poetry/noise rock collective got the Battle of the Bands banned from her former high school. Not, like, for her vast, devouring heart, or piercing, unclouded gaze, or relentless hunger for, and pursuit of justice and poetic irony. Because apparently that would be asking too much of the universe (although admittedly that Battle of the Bands was pretty sweet).
Though not asked to offer an example of the wisdom earned in her shuffle off the mortal coil, Quimms enthusiastically submitted that there is, indeed, life after love, only for those “strong enough” to serve at the pleasure of the Great Antenna’d Woman in Black.
If the old maxim states that “the eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator,” one must wonder just how dispassionate we must appear before Ms. Quimms’ tongue begins to slow, even beyond the grave.