
How many times do we need to see the same movie
before we've figured out the plot? Maybe the hero
this time won't win, the villain won't decide to push
forward his nefarious plans. Of world domination
we know nothing: the plot is foiled; always
the laser, having defeated the world's combined forces
of air and sea is forever deflected back onto itself
by the hero's clever triangulations. The villain explodes
along with his Island of Doom—or does he? The screen
goes dark; the credits roll, and with the brassy,
bassy hero's theme still echoing in our ears, we stumble
out, dazed, into the brazen daylight in which the villain's
scream of petulant power holds sway.
EW Wilder is an editor at EastWesterly Review, an online journal of literature and satire, and a scholar at the probably fictional Purewater University in Kansas where he specializes in the work of the also probably fictional deceased poet Archibald “Bean” Newton. The real-life person behind all this pleads plausible deniability but really does teach and write in Wichita.
