UNIVERSAL KILLER by AUDREY SNOW MATZKE
October 20 2025
I am a dull slacker, kept afloat by my prince, the Universal Killer. Why do I pay his cruel words any mind, what with his reputation being as it is?
Aurora wanted to know. We are two halves of a Substack Live broadcast where rare fruits are sampled and discussed, their ambrosiac potential ranked and debated. Last week was the Himalayan Yellow Raspberry. Aurora said “yellow in the way that lightning is yellow in cartoons,” and for the rest of the hour we just talked about ourselves!
For the week ahead we decided to go dark. Not figuratively, we still had an episode planned, but next on our agenda was the North American Black Raspberry, a mainstay in alternative medicine for its anti-aging, anti-inflammatory powers. We were headed to the farmers’ market to buy a sample-size on the low end of representative, deathly expensive as fruit is these days, when Aurora announced she had a criminal inside of her.
“Sometimes McKinley remembers you exist,” I said. “One day they’ll get him on cocaine possession, and he won’t have the privilege of being inside you for a year or two.”
“Ha ha. Not like that,” Aurora said. “White-collar. For some reason I just feel like Martha Stewart right now. Like whatever Martha Stewart went to jail for.”
“Insider trading?”
“That thing,” Aurora said. ”Powerful men keep coming into my life, it’s too much! I fear they will unduly influence me in the buying and selling of crypto and stocks.” I laughed, at her, and we boarded the ferry and sat down facing sternside, watching the mucky East River yield past us in reverse.
I visit the Universal Killer often, for his money, and to convert spare weekends into limitless mist. He has gone into hiding in the Broad Channel neighborhood of Queens, and in order to get to him I have to cross Jamaica Bay, on the A. Traversing open water so frequently and without any pushback or friction is bad for the heart, everyone pretends they don’t know this. It makes you suspect you are Jesus Christ.
The berries were drawn and overripe, by the time we arrived at the market. They lacked integrity and gushed swart blood everywhere, warning us that we had almost no time to eat them, and would have to commit their effects on us to memory. Our precious, notional theme: like always we would have to fill the window with gossip, and again I complained about the Universal Killer on air, what an unpredictable love he has been lately! This made him rage and want to kill, but the killing just sank to a shadowy place far beneath us, and his hands could not find their way back to my neck.
Before the episode went wrong in all our predictable ways, we planned to do a segment on the particulars of Fruit Culture, the lady at the market strumming folk songs out on the dewy green. We listened to her for nearly seven minutes. My favorite song of hers, about a penguin who kayaked across the desert, ended with “wears the paddle / where’s the paddle? Wears the paddle / where’s the paddle?” and so on, until the downstrokes gave way to ringing and hissing. Get it? Wears as in worn down by the sand, Where’s as in where did it go? The desert has eroded it!
I think that thousands might have died somewhere else, upon impact of that caliber of cleverness. On the way back the water lay flat for us. We swallowed the sapped berries in silence, until Aurora came up with “Anti-inflammatory sounds about right. In every corner of me, I can feel the fires dying.”
I warn you: do not kill the Universal Killer. Only a worse type of killing flows forth from that wound. Cockroaches growing opposable thumbs, people coming to know what true randomness looks and feels and tastes and acts like. I climb the stairs to the door of the home of my Universal Killer, shorn up with stilts to keep the (terrible) floods away! The guarantor of my specific, eternal life.
Audrey Snow Matzke was born in Chicago in 2002.