Hypertext Magazine asked Cathy Ulrich, author of Ghosts of You, “Does it matter, for these stories, who the murderer is?”
I wrote these stories with the specific intent of putting the focus where it belongs: on the victims and the people who loved them. There are only a few of them where I know who the killer is for certain (“Murdered Wife” is one of them, and I think it’s probably obvious to readers, but if it isn’t, I’ll never tell!). I remember a writer friend of mine read “Homecoming Queen” and told me “the homecoming king killed her,” and I realized she was right.
But the truth is, I don’t care about the killers. I never care about killers. There’s nothing interesting about a person who destroys things.
What is interesting to me is the people who have been lost, the women who have been lost in the stories of their murders. What matters to me, and to the stories, is their voices, their lives. If readers are curious about who the murderers are, I think that’s great! But in the end, to me, the murderer doesn’t matter. The murderer never, never matters.
Cathy Ulrich is the founding editor of Milk Candy Review, a journal of flash fiction. Her work has been published in various journals, including Black Warrior Review, Passages North, and Wigleaf and can be found in Best Microfiction 2019, Best Small Fictions 2019 and Wigleaf‘s Top 50 Very Short Fictions 2017 and 2019. She lives in Montana with her daughter and various small animals.