Welcome to our newest web feature, Found Fiction Friday! With authors’ permission, we’ll be posting stories (or in this case, excerpts!) from our issues online. Formatting is still unique to the books, but the story is free for all to read.
Today’s story is by Tim Lieder. Tim has been published in various markets including Shock Totem and Daughters of Frankenstein. Through Dybbuk Press he has published 9 titles including She Nailed a Stake Through His Head. Recently he self published his xmas stories under the title Sugarplum Zombie Motherfuckers. He lives in Manhattan.
This story is initially from Tales from the Crust: An Anthology of Pizza Horror from Ghoulish Books! It appeared as a reprint in Issue 3.
Warnings: Murder, toxic relationships, homophobia, referenced serial killers, referenced sexual exploitation, cannibalism
Before Yael Friedman’s death at the age of 27, her primary artistic output consisted of Identity Crisis spoken word performances and ketchup bottles sculpted from oak. The few videos of her spoken word reveals a sophist adherence to the literary function of language.
Three years after her funeral, Gigawatts, an independently published journal, acquired the rights to her biographical, psychological and mythical poetry. The following year, Zangwill Books published many of the same poems as well as forty others the following year in Tent Stake, the first Friedman collection. They barely promoted the book and sold fewer than 100 copies in the initial five years. A traditional publishing house would have remaindered all copies and allowed the book to fall silently out of print.
The discovery of Jordan Vav, alive and working for an Egyptian consortium, pushed Yael Friedman’s literary work into the mainstream. The renewed fascination with the Jordan Vav kidnapping only increased with the scarcity of material. The Vav family had purposefully erased Jordan’s existence from social media. Even Jordan’s notorious YouTube sermons were unavailable at the time. Zangwill Books was quick to promote Friedman’s Jordan poems from Tent Stake as a secondary source that had survived the purge. For a year, Friedman’s reinterpretation of Jordan Vav’s sermons provided the best link to the pre-war era.
Eventually that aspect of Tent Stake lost its novelty. Jordan Vav told her story and scholars found lost videos. Had Yael only written Jordan poems, her reputation would have faded. However, Tent Stake hosted several odes and lyrics and sonnets covering many themes. Ms. Friedman’s obsession with Hadassah Herz excited the attention of Detective Sharon Fisher who gifted the collection to Margaret Nguyen, an investigative journalist. Ms. Nguyen had been researching unsolved murders of pizza delivery drivers throughout Birmingham and she was the first of many to connect the love sonnet “Let’s Kill the Pizza Guy” with her case.
To this day, “Let’s Kill the Pizza Guy” remains one of the most chilling sonnets in the 21st century literary canon. Not only is it an achievement in literary rhetoric, but it has intoxicated expressionist and formalist critics alike with its emphasis on forensic details and breezy expression of ambivalent affection.
At the time, the sonnet was merely one among a dozen sonnets entered into evidence and broadcast over true crime podcasts. It quickly entered into the lexicon as actors created videos and holograms reciting the poem, at first dripping with irony but eventually pathos. Staged readings sprouted up in previously depressed towns with rewards given to the most popular narrators. The sonnet’s emphasis on unconscious drives and post-modern criticism attracted an audience starving for romantic odes.
Long after Hadassah Herz had been sentenced for the homicides of Paul McLean and Bob Bialostosky, with suspicion falling on her for the deaths of five other delivery workers, the poems remained in the public imagination. The appeal to pure form allowed for a wealth of literary criticism from traditions as diverse as New Historicism, Marxism, Freudian, Dworkinian, and feminist.
As “Let’s Kill the Pizza Guy” remains one of the most enduring sonnets in the Friedman literary canon, fascination with the relationship that inspired its creation grew. Through interviews with Ms. Herz from her jail cell and culling of the public records, scholars have established a time line of the relationship which began when Yael met Ms. Herz at a wedding where they drunkenly kissed in the yichud room.
After nine intense months of non-discriminating physical and mental torture, Hadassah Herz informed Yael that she couldn’t see her. The news did not come easily.
Most scholars accept Professor Bozeman’s theory that Yael’s Hadassah poems began with this first breakup. In the next two months, Hadassah and Yael reconciled and fell away three times. After both women had issued restraining orders, Yael performed the Hadassah sonnets and stanzas in coffee houses until she publicly abandoned them for golem poetry.
For almost a decade, Yael Friedman fans accepted the published Hadassah poems as her best, but longed for supporting material. Fans devoted hours to poring over Hadassah poems to interpret the minutia of the relationship. Professor Norman Halliburton of St. Thomas managed to contribute to the Yael Friedman canon with a book solely devoted to fan theories.
Scholarship into Yael Friedman’s Hadassah poems remained stagnant as neither the Friedman family nor Hadassah Herz agreed to interviews. Ms. Herz was appealing her conviction and the Friedman family refused to openly discuss their daughter and sister “falling prey to the homosexual agenda”.
A completely unrelated inquiry opened up everything when Moorehead State graduate student Nora Duyfhuizen was struggling to prove the Sisera is Free Patreon campaign as a Yael Friedman page, based on the three public poems. At the time, academics were racing to discover traces of Yael Friedman through dozens of seemingly unrelated blogs and Facebook profiles. In fact, researchers had discovered several potential identities for Ms. Friedman among reddit users and slash fiction writers.
As Nora Duyfhuizen wrote and revised her thesis, her adviser remained skeptical and even suggested a change in focus. Nora Duyfhuizen’s academic frustration led her to pay for the $50/month patronage to unlock all journal entries. In interviews, Dr. Duyfhuizen often claimed that she feared that the paywall journal entries would disprove her thesis. Her hesitation quickly turned to ebullience as she read the first of the many Dassie posts.
The rest of the Friedman canon appears in in Issue 3.
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