The Idiot's Guide to Killing Your Mother-in-Law

by James Mathews

About the Author: James Mathews was raised in El Paso, Texas. His stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Florida Review, The Wisconsin Review, The Pacific Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Northwest Review, and many more. His most short story, “Many Dogs Have Died Here” appears in the Best American Mystery Stories of 2015 (ed. James Patterson). He is also the author of a short story collection, Last Known Position, which won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction.

Excerpt

She fixed me with a dark stare, a withering stare, a cruel and unusual stare. It was the kind of stare I associated with boxers who meet briefly in the center of the ring while the referee recites rules neither fighter intends to honor. I knew right then I should have waited to meet her. A few more days at least, allowing for the news that her only daughter had eloped with a stranger to settle and digest. But I didn’t. And now I knew something else. Something terrible. I knew—looking at her and she at me, before either of us had spoken a word—that I would have to kill her.

Larissa, my wife of four days, had assured me that all would be well, that her mother—although a little “old-fashioned”—would accept me. I could see now the futility of that prediction. To begin with, she didn’t look old-fashioned. She was on the business side of sixty with a rack of hair that had been salon-colored and pampered on a regulated weekly schedule. She was lean to the point of scrawny, but she clearly had the time, money and good sense to dress well—in a silky, long-sleeve purple dress that fell just below the knees. All in all, she looked formidable and serious, decorated with expensive jewelry attached to all the usual places.

It was her eyes, though, that told her story and, as far as I was concerned, sealed her doom. They were pinched and glassy and unforgiving, shaded over with a severe brow that suggested decades of inbreeding among very rich people engaged in perpetual blood feuds. They were the eyes of a subterranean animal. They were the eyes of marital ruin.

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