kurt luchs

Always Be Closing

The company is constantly springing the latest sales training on us,
just trying to help I suppose. Now Brigette and I were in front of
a potential customer, putting some of the new techniques
into practice. She sweetly asked the guy, whose name was Pete,
for a glass of water. Then she stood up and poured it slowly
over her head with one hand while rubbing her stomach with
the other and saying, “Glug, glug, glug!” That certainly got
Pete’s attention. He stared at her, fascinated, as she pulled a
medium-sized halibut from her purse and smacked herself in the face
with it, once on each cheek. She held the fish up, gazing into
its dead eyes, and said, “You’ve been a very bad boy.” Then she
threw it with all her might at the conference room window, which
shattered instantly, spraying us with shards of glass. Pete grinned
from ear to ear and nodded his head while he brushed glass from
his sweater. “I think I see what you mean,” he said. “You don’t see
anything, monkey boy,” said Brigette. She took off her blazer and
gave it to me to hold. Then she leaped across the table, grabbed Pete
by the throat and sucker punched him in the stomach. He bent over,
gasping, and said, “That’s the most convincing presentation
I’ve ever seen. Consider me sold.” Brigette walked around the
table, took the blazer from me, put it back on, straightened her
glasses and sat down. “How many color copiers would you like,
Mr. Drummond?” she said.

Kurt Luchs (kurtluchs.com) has poems published in Plume Poetry Journal, The Bitter Oleander and La Piccioletta Barca. He won the 2022 Pushcart Prize, as well as the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His humor collection, It’s Funny Until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It’s Really Funny) (2017), and his poetry collection, Falling in the Direction of Up (2021), are both published by Sagging Meniscus Press. He lives in Portage, Michigan.