Great! One little nit-pic..maybe say it was Kendall earlier in the 911 call. I had to go back.
Maybe you could tighten up that great ending. Just say someting like ...'I already have....
A wife for a wife, and even more.'

Fun reading, start to finish. Thanks.

But the New York Times doesn't have a comics section. Not even on Sundays.

Great story -- very deftly told. Thanks for sharing it. I didn't mean to read it until later, but I got pulled in and couldn't stop. Since you asked:

- A typo: "I sleepwalked thought my days"
- When he finds the gun in a closet it's a .45, but later it's a .22.
- I found "cursory examination" to be distracting--why not just say it was loaded?
- I loved the reference to stygian darkness. Makes me think of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
- NYT has no comics section.

Oh, so you have time to write your stories, but no time for us? I see. That's how it is now.

Great story though, and well written. Nice twist. A few typos, but I assume their editor will take care of those.

One point I thought was a little cheap (in retrospect) - he carefully tracks Byre's movements and jots down notes about his closest neighbors as well. If he were tracking Mrs. Byre, it's glaringly missing from there. (I understand why you left it out, but I don't think it quite works for him to leave it out.)

Ummm... having posted it may have compromised your ability to sell it. They almost certainly buy first publication rights, and, well, you just published it. (It's up to them, of course.)

Unless the narrator and his beloved were setting hens, they wouldn't "lay under the covers", they would lie under the covers.

I also had to go back and re-read the 911 call scene. It's because you're in first person just before it, then the call goes right into first person, but the narrator has changed.

At the end, I also went back to re-read, but I suspect you'd see *that* as a good thing...

"His attorney structured his case around a two arguments."

I'm guessing the 'a' is spurious :-)

I don't know if I'm too late but here are my thoughts:
I really liked it.
If people have a "box of cigarettes" it's a carton not a pack like someone would normally carry even if the pack itself is an actual box.
Your gun changes from a 45 when the protaganist finds it to a 22 when he is buying the silencer.
A run through for grammatical errors and I think you are done!
Nice job. I'm a subscriber to AHMM and I would love to read this again in print!

By "gibbets" I assume you mean "giblets"? Unless of course you want to turn birds into guillotines/gallows.

I felt (aside from the "Mr. Vocabulary Prick" comments above) that the ending felt a little bit rushed to me. I loved the reveal of the fact that the wife was killed, beautifully snuck in.

I'm with tulip.

I would just add that I thought the bit about the dinosaur and the broken flower vase was a bit lacking in development and could've been foreshadowed better.

(Yes. You're right. A little bitter that I missed it? You could say that.)

The New York Times Magazine has comics, of a sort, on Sunday.

And William F. Buckley is still dead. Hooray!

Keep your day job.

You stop posting for many weeks, so I adjust my visitation schedule. I came on the 26th. No post. I return today. I missed literature.

This simply will not do. Any chance of getting a late-arrival story pass?

You aren't some sort of liberal Jew? Because if you were, I'd never hire you to be editor of my prestigious, big word usin', Negro-hatin' magazine The Weekly Standard. Perhaps if you were liberal, I'd let it slide.

Now I must dine with Generalissimo Franco and Adolf Hitler in Conservative Catholic Heaven. I'm playing my harpsichord for Ken Lay and Pablo Escobar.

Toodles.