By JUDE TAIT
The members of The Insinuator trickled into the lecture hall like slow-drip cold brew, the go-to drink for discerning collegiate litmaggers. But tonight, Theme Night, the beverage of choice was zealous and rambling debate. The long tables were cluttered with tote bags, hastily-bought snacks, and the earnest chaos that came from having forty people that considered themselves writers in one room.
“Okay!” shouted Cynthia, the editor-in-chief, clapping her hands. “You know the drill. Suggestions on the board. Speeches in favor. Then vote.”
And so it began. On the whiteboard, three leading contenders emerged. INKLING — LIKE A FISH NEEDS A BICYCLE — and BLOODY MARY, BLOODY MARY, BLOODY MARY. Doodles crowded the margins: spirals, coffee cups, a dozen cartoon eyes in bright Expo red.
Inkling had its partisans, the ones who liked subtlety and innuendo. “It’s about beginnings,” said Tracy, who wrote explicit slash fiction about ghosts but refused to call them ghosts. “Like the spark of unrequited love!”
Like a fish needs a bicycle drew laughs and impassioned speeches. It was quirky, feminist, ironic, iconic — all the magazine’s favorite adjectives.
But Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary… that one started as a joke. Mostly.
“Because it’s fall,” argued Lana, seeing the skeptical looks. “We do a horror issue. It’s fun, it’s on-theme, it’s gory — vote Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary!” She slammed her fist on the podium for emphasis, leaving the smallest of cracks.
“Do you have to say that out loud?” interjected Jake, smirking.
“You bet,” Lana shot back. “What, you scared?”
Jake shrugged lazily. “Maybe.”
“Maybe we should summon her to help edit our drafts,” said Philip.
Groans, laughter. The hum of the overhead lights swallowed it, like sucking air between teeth.
Cynthia looked up from her notes. “Alright, alright, alright. Let’s vote.”
Hands went up, down, up again as people changed their minds mid-air. Typical fickle democracy.
“Count carefully this time,” someone muttered.
Cynthia counted aloud, craning her neck to tally every hand. Jake, sprawled across his chair in the back, raised his at the last second.
“Inkling, twenty. Like a fish needs a bicycle, twenty-two. Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary… twenty-three.”
A small cheer, half-hearted but sincere. Wide grins here, disbelieving stares there. Lana rubbed her hands together in anticipation.
“Barely passed,” said Tracy. “Fitting for a ghost story.”
Raquel, the social chair, bounded to the front, whipping out her phone for a whiteboard selfie. Cynthia and the rest of the Eboard crowded in.
The camera flash burst, reflecting off glasses and computer screens and Hydro Flasks. The gaggle shielded their eyes, cringing away in mock agony. Sebastian, the arts editor, made like he’d been stabbed, earning a playful shove in the back. Behind him, the eyes on the whiteboard smudged into a crimson smear.
“That’s going on the ‘grams,” Raquel said, satisfied.
Would she be as happy had she seen the extra face in the flash?
“Okay, you guys can go now,” Cynthia said, waving them away. “Theme decided. Meeting adjourned.”
Most didn’t need a second invitation. Chairs scraped. Coats rustled. Aspiring literary luminaries filtered out.
“We should go to the bathroom and say her name three times to celebrate,” Raquel joked. Sebastian pretended to shudder.
“Yeah right.”
The laughter followed them out into the hallway, echoing as the door swung shut. Inside, the whiteboard still glowed faintly under the fluorescents.
…
Alone in her dorm room, Lana cracked her knuckles. Loosened her neck. Opened her computer. Her reflection stared back from the screen.
A fresh doc. “The Mirror – First Draft.”
A new take on a classic story. It would be brilliant. She was so stoked they had chosen her idea. She had waited her whole life for this moment.
The words flowed. So well, she even FaceTimed Philip midway through to brag about it.
“I’m six hundred words in already,” Lana gloated. “How far are you?”
“About forty-seven,” Philip answered despairingly.
“Tsk tsk. Gotta step up that pace if you wanna meet deadline.”
“Yeah. Something weird keeps happening though.” Suddenly, Philip’s face and voice got garbled. Typical of the shitty campus signal. “My draft, it — ****hh**ss — without me doing it.”
“What? I didn’t get that.”
“Someone wrote a sentence in my draft.” His brow was furrowed.
“Wow, how revolutionary.”
“No, I’m serious. It wasn’t me. A sentence I wrote was replaced. And I didn’t share the doc with anyone.”
“Must’ve been Mary.”
“Hey, that’s not funny,” Philip said. He sounded almost scared.
Lana laughed. “Lighten up. Wasn’t it you who said we should summon her? To help edit?”
“Well, I didn’t mean literally!” he said heatedly.
“Sounds like she has an eye for the cut,” Lana smirked.
“…Sure.”
“Dude, it’s probably just some practical joke. One of the editors getting clever with it. I’ll let you get back to work, talk tomorrow, ‘kay?”
“Lana, wait—”
But she had already shut off her phone.
And in the black screen, she was not alone. A face stared back. Open-mouthed, and red as strawberries in the summertime.
Lana shrieked loud enough to wake the neighbors. Fumbled the phone, didn’t bother to pick it up. She just ran. Out the room, out the door, into the street.
Back in her dorm, a sentence wrote itself.
“And they always said her writing lacked a voice.”
The lights flickered once. No one noticed.
…
“Oh my god. Is that an ambulance?”
Tracy looked up from her “Moaning Mary” fic (in which a thinly-veiled parody of a famous teenage witch has a blood-soaked tryst with a bathroom-dwelling specter) to peer out the window of Snow Library. Across from her, Cynthia scanned the campus grounds, worry wrought across her face.
Flashing lights on the street. A few medics scurrying about. Tracy returned to her story. “Probably another alcoholism incident.”
“No… it’s… oh my god. Oh my god. They’re putting Lana on a stretcher.”
“What?” Tracy put her computer aside.
“I need to go see if she’s okay,” Cynthia said, voice shaky. She scattered English readings all over the ground as she stood, and didn’t look back.
Tracy stooped to gather up the papers. Lana would be alright, she was sure. She’d head down as soon as she cleaned up Cynthia’s mess. Cynthia could be scatterbrained sometimes.
Once she put the papers neatly back on the table, Tracy took one last glance out the window. This time, she saw Lana’s stretcher. The medics were covering it in a white sheet. A white sheet stained with red.
…
Hours later, Tracy, eyes red and puffy, returned to her computer. It was still open, right where she had left it. The cursor hovered over a new sentence, a sentence she didn’t remember writing.
“Show, don’t tell.”
…
Sniffles. Sobs. A healthy dose of righteous indignation. What was originally pencilled in as a drop-in editing session morphed into an impromptu mourning circle. One for grieving and grievances.
“It’s a sick joke. A fucking sick joke,” Cynthia raged. “Someone’s hacking our drafts. There’s no other explanation.”
“You had it too?” Raquel whispered.
“Yeah. Sick fuckers. Making light of… of what happened to Lana.”
“What’d they write?”
“Does it matter?” Cynthia seethed. “We need to get to the bottom of this. Open your drafts, all of you. And don’t you dare pull anything funny. If I see anyone typing, you’re dead.”
So they did. They waited in a horrible, choking silence. Finally, Jake laughed nervously. “Guys, this is stupid. Lana wouldn’t want us doing this.”
“What are we supposed to do then, Jake? Maybe we should just call the issue off. It’s cursed!” Cynthia tugged at her hair.
Tracy’s voice was thick but resolute. “No, he’s right. This issue was her idea. We need to finish it for her.”
Nods, murmurs of assent. Cynthia took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay.”
And in that moment, the sentence appeared.
“She finally learned what it meant to kill her darlings.”
“Nope. Nope. Fuck you. Fuck you.” Cynthia stood, backed away from the screen.
Her colleagues stared at her like she was going mad. “Cynthia—” Sebastian began, reaching to give her a reassuring hand.
The lights flickered. Everyone noticed.
And in the reflection of the screen, a single eye. The glint of a red smile.
Cynthia made a noise somewhere between a scream and a sob. With her typical, practiced efficiency, she snatched up her thermos and smashed it into the computer.
Shards of glass, black as night, flew everywhere. They slashed Cynthia’s arms and slit Sebastian’s throat. Eyes in every one.
…
It was the worst story to come out of the college in its history, and by and by, an urban legend unto itself. The campus newspaper reported that every member of the literary magazine died mysteriously the week before Halloween. The final issue was automatically scheduled and went live at midnight: BLOODY MARY, BLOODY MARY, BLOODY MARY.
…
You scroll to the bottom of the document.
The cursor blinks.
It types another line before you can stop it:
“Who’s still reading?”
Writer | Jude Tait ’28 | vtait28@amherst.edu
Editor | Alex Womack ’27 | awomack27@amherst.edu
Artist | Ashley Kim ’28 | arkim28@amherst.edu