I’ve visited more than my fair share of convenience stores. All of those visits have, thankfully, ended peacefully. That’s not necessarily the case for the characters in “Swing and a Miss”, a new crime fiction short story I wrote which the good people at Near to the Knuckle (follow them on Twitter!) were kind enough to publish.
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SPOILER ALERT: You may want to read the story (here’s another link) before reading the rest of this blog post.
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Now, I feel I must confess that the moral of “Swing and a Miss” has nothing whatsoever to do with violence. Obviously violence is bad, but we all know that already, don’t we? I wrote this story primarily as a platform to espouse the Arneson Equation of Pie Deliciousness (AEoPD). It goes like this:
Cherry > Apple > All Other Pies
The AEoPD corollary, focused on convenience store pies, is:
Tastykake > Hostess > Little Debbie > All Other Pies
Given enough time and the proper amount of publicity, I believe the AEoPD will someday take its rightful place next to the Pythagorean Theorem and that thing Einstein threw together about energy, mass, and the speed of light. If you’re a college professor or high school teacher, please feel free to incorporate the AEoPD into your curriculum.
And if you’re a maker of cherry pies, please send me samples.
Erik Arneson 