Murder Mystery

We were sharing identical eruptions of hives and acne, sharing even the same muscular ache in our lower back, like we’d become one body. I thought we’d become very close. Intimate. Then I realized we’d both been poisoned.

People were really losing their minds. I couldn't help but notice that the writers were making art and composers were staying up late at night in their rooms without sound, and artists were not making anything at all.  Instead, they were taking long walks for “inspiration,” stopping at the creek outside my window where they all seemed to be surprised, day after day, that the creek was too wide to cross. One woman spent dinnertime discussing possible strategies—barges, log-bridges, and flotillas. I suggested simple gators. But people were not in their places. They had strayed from their disciplines. I continued to write.

A writer took to hanging all the red and green apples we had on a winter-naked tree near his window. They hung from paperclips and string, like dumb mobiles and I had to trek to this area whenever I wanted a piece of fruit, dismantling the apple from its hook. I also caught this same gentleman on top of many roofs leaving large deposits of congealed food coloring that he hoped, he said, would leave the buildings with large colored icicles.

The strangest resident drove a white BMW and kept his dry cleaning in the car the entire length of our stay. This was Wyoming.