Volume 24, Issue 2 (2011)

THE MIDWESTERN REVIEW MONSTER WANTS YOUR TEXTS

Scuttling through the halls of Asbury, the Midwestern Review Monster sniffs the student brains. Her fur feels like wire and she’s rarely clean—she eats art for breakfast, stories for dinner. She never uses a napkin and she never takes a bath. She has an appetite for Shakespeare and student sonnets.

“I need writing.” The monster says. “I need to collect writing.” The monster sniffs and clicks her claws together. “I smell an English major,” she says. The monster scurries down the hall and jumps on the back of a student, sniffing his mind.

“Mmmmmm,” says the monster. “Juicy sentences, peppery allu- sions, crunchy odes, sticky irony… and oh my.” She licks the student’s ear. “Nutty metaphors.”

She swipes the student’s words.

The monster scampers to the library, tucking words in her pockets as she whisks by them. She licks the mind of a physics major. The monster freezes, the hair on her furry body bristles. “Physics isn’t too bad.” The monster smacks her lips. “Tastes like gamma rays and gravity.”

She runs through the music school stuffing her pockets with art. She scarfs down the music notes, spitting out the flats.

The Midwestern Review Monster pilfers and filches words until one day her furry pockets overflow. She goes home and dumps the words all over the floor. She looks at them lying on the ground. The monster clacks her claws together with nervous energy.

“That’s no use,” she says, scratching her dandruffy ear. She licks the stories, sniffs the poems, coddles the paintings.

“No, No, no, no, no, no,” she says. “It’s no good.”

She scratches her furry belly with tiny claws.

“I’ve got it!” she says. She scoops all the words in her arms, throws them in a box, and writes a note on the address line:

DEAR PRINTER. PLEASE MAKE ENOUGH COPIES FOR ALL OF DEPAUW.

–MWR MONSTER

She crawls in the box, seals it shut, and then ships off to the publisher.