The Tell-Tale Heart, as told by Jodi Picoult
Recently I have been wondering where notorious murderer of the English language Jodi Picoult gets her ideas for her twist endings. I think the answer is probably something like, out of her butt. However, I was curious to see what would happen if one of literature's classic twists was rewritten in her, uh, singular style.
The Tell-Tale Heart
by: Jodi Picoult
Chapter 1
No doubt I now grew VERY pale; but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased -- and what could I do? It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND -- MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased. O God! what COULD I do? I foamed -- I raved -- I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! -- no, no? They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! -- they were making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now -- again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER! --
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!"
Chance Daring, ace lawyer, was still attractive at the age of forty. During her fifteen year career as an ace lawyer, she had appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States and argued successfully for the rights of gay orphan war refugees. She had also done some bad things too like getting pedophiles or whatever acquitted of all charges. In spite of her unrivaled success, Chance still thought it was very important that people know she was still attractive and like didn’t have any stretch marks or anything like those other dowdy lady lawyers.
But Chance had a horrible secret: the reason she had no stretch marks was because she was childless. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been chances. Lots of rich and powerful men had courted Chance, but in the end it turned out they were all control freaks. Chance was a control freak, too, but it was different when she did it because, as previously mentioned, she was a hot successful lawyer who made $300,000 a year but also totally had some real, down-to-earth flaws, like not being able to cook (fortunately she could eat out a Doug’s Cafe, the swanky French bistro every night), and sometimes losing her car keys (though she suspected the maid of hiding them because Chance had refused to raise her salary to $3.50 an hour).
“Holy cats!” Chance exclaimed suddenly. “My god, those commas in the last paragraph… are they all in the right places?”
Chance often had thoughts of commas these days, and where their proper places should be. She felt as if she, had been deprived of proper comma placement her whole, life and she was only now, realizing that something, was missing.
Something besides the commas, I mean.
You see, Chance had a dark secret and that secret was that there was a gaping hole in her life. The hole was her vagina, which had never before felt the pleasing caress of a baby being squeezed out of it.
Chance knew that having a cute l’il baby to squeeze and cuddle would be way more rewarding than her millions in the bank, successful career, outstanding wardrobe, and parade of handsome boyfriends. She knew this because she was a girl and all girls could only be fulfilled through the joys of motherhood and not defending stupid gay orphan war refugees who didn’t even know what smooth jazz was.
Time for the double carriage return!
In addition to the baby thing, Chance had another deep dark secret and that secret was that her parents had died under mysterious circumstances that had made her sad.
Thirty-nine years ago to this very day, her parents had been scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef when the tour boat they were supposed to take back to shore sailed off and abandoned them. It was just like that one thing that was in the papers about the couple who had been scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef when the tour boat they were supposed to take back to shore had sailed off and abandoned them and then they made a movie about it called Open Water.
That was probably just a coincidence, though.
Chance had been raised by her kindly eccentric aunt in the hills of Virginia. Her aunt was very kindly, but also sort of eccentric, and as Chance turned off the highway toward her aunt’s farm, she wondered what kind but a little eccentric greeting she had prepared.
Suddenly the steering wheel jerked left in her hands. The car veered toward the ditch that ran alongside the gravel road. Chance gave a bloodcurdling scream! She knew if she went off the edge, it would cause some serious body damage and she would have to wait for AAA and they always took like a couple of hours.
Chance Daring, ace attorney, didn’t have a couple hours to spare!
She let go of the steering wheel, flung her arms up, and sang a verse of Jesus, Take the Wheel (the applicable one about the car accident, not the one about the alcoholic, even though the one about the car accident is actually the second verse). By some miracle, the car rolled to a stop.
Chance was so relieved that for a second she forgot that she was an atheist and so she said a quick prayer to the God of Abraham. Afterwards, she was really embarrassed because she had stopped believing in God the day her parent’s bloodstained passports had washed ashore in Fiji with cartoon shark bites taken out of them.
After the double carriage return, Chance was standing outside her car surveying the damage. The left front tire was totally flat. She had been going almost 20 mph when it happened. It was a miracle she hadn’t been killed or seriously inconvenienced!
While Chance was trying to decide whether to call her kindly but eccentric aunt, or one of her entourage of hot cabana boys to pick her up, she saw a red light approaching… and a blue light… no, just a red light… now it was blue…
A minute later, a police car rolled up beside her. It had its flashers going, which was the reason she had seen repeating red and blue lights, Chance surmised with her brilliant lawyerly mind. The window on the driver’s side rolled down, and Chance saw the head of a man emerge. Her heart gave a squeal of delight, since he was so totally hot. His auburn hair was hidden under a Stetson hat, and behind his dark aviator glasses his eyes were blue.
“Howdy, Ma’am. Just what’s a purdy lady like yerself doin’ round these here parts?”
“I wanted to get a job as a coal miner,” said Chance sarcastically, since some perfunctory research into this particular region of Virginia had shown that there were a lot of mines and Chance wanted to make sure that the hot sheriff knew she had done her perfunctory research. In retrospect, it didn’t make a lot of sense, but the hot sheriff laughed at her wittiness all the same.
“Well, Ma’am. I ain’t no ivory tower intellecshel, but even I know that if’n you squeeze coal hard enough, it done becomes a diamond.”
Chance’s heart melted. And so did her baby-maker.
“My name’s Luke Flintsteel.”
“Chance Daring,” said Chance Daring coyly.
“Why your name is just like the name of that fancy lawyer from Richmond!”
Chance Daring only smiled to herself, which Luke thought was a weird reaction, but he popped the door on the passenger side anyway.
“Why don’t you get in? I’ll drive you yon to town.”
The town of Tell-Tale was a quaint town, with lots of quaint people. Ninety percent of the citizens were employed by the ball bearing factory or the Wal-Mart, and that was the way they liked it. No, seriously, they loved it.
As Chance drove down Main Street with Luke Flintsteel, she saw some little girls jumping rope and some old men sitting on the porch of the barbershop. One lady was pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk.
“This is sure a pretty town,” said Chance. “It must be great to live here…”
“It’s real fine,” replied Luke. “Except for the horrible secret, of course.”
“Well, I don’t know how horrible your horrible secret could be. In such a nice place as this, it’s not like anyone is murdering his landlord and burying the body parts under the floorboards, right?”
Luke did not reply.
At the police station, Luke parked the car in the space left by the double carriage return and said, “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee? I’ll call George MacGillicutty who owns the local garage and have him tow your car.”
Though Chance was totally tired of police stations from her time as an ace lawyer, she was still hoping to get Luke Flintsteel’s number and so she followed him inside. Chance noticed a bustle of activity that was unusual for such a small town police station and she wondered what could possibly have happened. Whatever it was, it was big.
As Luke was getting her a cup of coffee, one of his deputies came up and started talking to him and coincidentally enough Chance overheard the entire conversation.
“We brought the scumbag in ten minutes ago,” said the deputy, who had a permanent sneer and a villainous black mustache that he was twirling. “We have a taped and signed confession from him. No respectably lawyer is going to touch this case.”
Chance’s ears perked up. She thought she smelled a chance to redeem herself for her wrongdoings, but it turned out it was just Folgers Crystals.
“You want to know the worst part?” the dastardly deputy went on. “He had buried the heart under the floorboards!”
Chance sprang up, spilling her coffee everywhere and getting second degree burns of justice on her hand. “Listen buster, that’s my client you’re talking about!”
Sheriff Luke’s eyes shown with admiration. The dastardly deputy looked confused. “Who… who even are you, lady?”
“Don’t you know? I’m Chance Daring, the best lawyer in Chester, VA, which is the second biggest suburb of Richmond and boasts a population of almost 20,000. Your Podunk hick town doesn’t deserve someone of my vaunted reputation, but I feel an inexplicable connection to this cold-blooded remorseless murderer, like maybe he is my long-lost twin brother or something, and so I’m going to represent him.”
“Podunk?” the dastardly deputy repeated. “Look, I don’t really think that’s appropriate. Besides it’s not like Chester is a booming metropolis or anything…”
Chance got all up in his business. “Don’t fuck with Chester, buddy. We’ve got a P. F. Chang’s now.”
With that, she stormed off to meet with her new client, who the media had already dubbed the Floorboard-Heart-Buryer-Underer Killer. She knew this because on the way to the interrogation room she saw a special edition of the Tell-Tale Teller with a big headline on the front that said,
FLOORBOARD-HEART-BURYER-UNDERER KILL CAUGHT
Oh, no. What had she gotten herself into?
The Tell-Tale Heart
by: Jodi Picoult
Chapter 1
No doubt I now grew VERY pale; but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased -- and what could I do? It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND -- MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily increased. O God! what COULD I do? I foamed -- I raved -- I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder -- louder -- louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! -- no, no? They heard! -- they suspected! -- they KNEW! -- they were making a mockery of my horror! -- this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! -- and now -- again -- hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER! --
"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! -- tear up the planks! -- here, here! -- it is the beating of his hideous heart!"
Chance Daring, ace lawyer, was still attractive at the age of forty. During her fifteen year career as an ace lawyer, she had appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States and argued successfully for the rights of gay orphan war refugees. She had also done some bad things too like getting pedophiles or whatever acquitted of all charges. In spite of her unrivaled success, Chance still thought it was very important that people know she was still attractive and like didn’t have any stretch marks or anything like those other dowdy lady lawyers.
But Chance had a horrible secret: the reason she had no stretch marks was because she was childless. It wasn’t that there hadn’t been chances. Lots of rich and powerful men had courted Chance, but in the end it turned out they were all control freaks. Chance was a control freak, too, but it was different when she did it because, as previously mentioned, she was a hot successful lawyer who made $300,000 a year but also totally had some real, down-to-earth flaws, like not being able to cook (fortunately she could eat out a Doug’s Cafe, the swanky French bistro every night), and sometimes losing her car keys (though she suspected the maid of hiding them because Chance had refused to raise her salary to $3.50 an hour).
“Holy cats!” Chance exclaimed suddenly. “My god, those commas in the last paragraph… are they all in the right places?”
Chance often had thoughts of commas these days, and where their proper places should be. She felt as if she, had been deprived of proper comma placement her whole, life and she was only now, realizing that something, was missing.
Something besides the commas, I mean.
You see, Chance had a dark secret and that secret was that there was a gaping hole in her life. The hole was her vagina, which had never before felt the pleasing caress of a baby being squeezed out of it.
Chance knew that having a cute l’il baby to squeeze and cuddle would be way more rewarding than her millions in the bank, successful career, outstanding wardrobe, and parade of handsome boyfriends. She knew this because she was a girl and all girls could only be fulfilled through the joys of motherhood and not defending stupid gay orphan war refugees who didn’t even know what smooth jazz was.
Time for the double carriage return!
In addition to the baby thing, Chance had another deep dark secret and that secret was that her parents had died under mysterious circumstances that had made her sad.
Thirty-nine years ago to this very day, her parents had been scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef when the tour boat they were supposed to take back to shore sailed off and abandoned them. It was just like that one thing that was in the papers about the couple who had been scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef when the tour boat they were supposed to take back to shore had sailed off and abandoned them and then they made a movie about it called Open Water.
That was probably just a coincidence, though.
Chance had been raised by her kindly eccentric aunt in the hills of Virginia. Her aunt was very kindly, but also sort of eccentric, and as Chance turned off the highway toward her aunt’s farm, she wondered what kind but a little eccentric greeting she had prepared.
Suddenly the steering wheel jerked left in her hands. The car veered toward the ditch that ran alongside the gravel road. Chance gave a bloodcurdling scream! She knew if she went off the edge, it would cause some serious body damage and she would have to wait for AAA and they always took like a couple of hours.
Chance Daring, ace attorney, didn’t have a couple hours to spare!
She let go of the steering wheel, flung her arms up, and sang a verse of Jesus, Take the Wheel (the applicable one about the car accident, not the one about the alcoholic, even though the one about the car accident is actually the second verse). By some miracle, the car rolled to a stop.
Chance was so relieved that for a second she forgot that she was an atheist and so she said a quick prayer to the God of Abraham. Afterwards, she was really embarrassed because she had stopped believing in God the day her parent’s bloodstained passports had washed ashore in Fiji with cartoon shark bites taken out of them.
After the double carriage return, Chance was standing outside her car surveying the damage. The left front tire was totally flat. She had been going almost 20 mph when it happened. It was a miracle she hadn’t been killed or seriously inconvenienced!
While Chance was trying to decide whether to call her kindly but eccentric aunt, or one of her entourage of hot cabana boys to pick her up, she saw a red light approaching… and a blue light… no, just a red light… now it was blue…
A minute later, a police car rolled up beside her. It had its flashers going, which was the reason she had seen repeating red and blue lights, Chance surmised with her brilliant lawyerly mind. The window on the driver’s side rolled down, and Chance saw the head of a man emerge. Her heart gave a squeal of delight, since he was so totally hot. His auburn hair was hidden under a Stetson hat, and behind his dark aviator glasses his eyes were blue.
“Howdy, Ma’am. Just what’s a purdy lady like yerself doin’ round these here parts?”
“I wanted to get a job as a coal miner,” said Chance sarcastically, since some perfunctory research into this particular region of Virginia had shown that there were a lot of mines and Chance wanted to make sure that the hot sheriff knew she had done her perfunctory research. In retrospect, it didn’t make a lot of sense, but the hot sheriff laughed at her wittiness all the same.
“Well, Ma’am. I ain’t no ivory tower intellecshel, but even I know that if’n you squeeze coal hard enough, it done becomes a diamond.”
Chance’s heart melted. And so did her baby-maker.
“My name’s Luke Flintsteel.”
“Chance Daring,” said Chance Daring coyly.
“Why your name is just like the name of that fancy lawyer from Richmond!”
Chance Daring only smiled to herself, which Luke thought was a weird reaction, but he popped the door on the passenger side anyway.
“Why don’t you get in? I’ll drive you yon to town.”
The town of Tell-Tale was a quaint town, with lots of quaint people. Ninety percent of the citizens were employed by the ball bearing factory or the Wal-Mart, and that was the way they liked it. No, seriously, they loved it.
As Chance drove down Main Street with Luke Flintsteel, she saw some little girls jumping rope and some old men sitting on the porch of the barbershop. One lady was pushing a baby carriage down the sidewalk.
“This is sure a pretty town,” said Chance. “It must be great to live here…”
“It’s real fine,” replied Luke. “Except for the horrible secret, of course.”
“Well, I don’t know how horrible your horrible secret could be. In such a nice place as this, it’s not like anyone is murdering his landlord and burying the body parts under the floorboards, right?”
Luke did not reply.
At the police station, Luke parked the car in the space left by the double carriage return and said, “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of coffee? I’ll call George MacGillicutty who owns the local garage and have him tow your car.”
Though Chance was totally tired of police stations from her time as an ace lawyer, she was still hoping to get Luke Flintsteel’s number and so she followed him inside. Chance noticed a bustle of activity that was unusual for such a small town police station and she wondered what could possibly have happened. Whatever it was, it was big.
As Luke was getting her a cup of coffee, one of his deputies came up and started talking to him and coincidentally enough Chance overheard the entire conversation.
“We brought the scumbag in ten minutes ago,” said the deputy, who had a permanent sneer and a villainous black mustache that he was twirling. “We have a taped and signed confession from him. No respectably lawyer is going to touch this case.”
Chance’s ears perked up. She thought she smelled a chance to redeem herself for her wrongdoings, but it turned out it was just Folgers Crystals.
“You want to know the worst part?” the dastardly deputy went on. “He had buried the heart under the floorboards!”
Chance sprang up, spilling her coffee everywhere and getting second degree burns of justice on her hand. “Listen buster, that’s my client you’re talking about!”
Sheriff Luke’s eyes shown with admiration. The dastardly deputy looked confused. “Who… who even are you, lady?”
“Don’t you know? I’m Chance Daring, the best lawyer in Chester, VA, which is the second biggest suburb of Richmond and boasts a population of almost 20,000. Your Podunk hick town doesn’t deserve someone of my vaunted reputation, but I feel an inexplicable connection to this cold-blooded remorseless murderer, like maybe he is my long-lost twin brother or something, and so I’m going to represent him.”
“Podunk?” the dastardly deputy repeated. “Look, I don’t really think that’s appropriate. Besides it’s not like Chester is a booming metropolis or anything…”
Chance got all up in his business. “Don’t fuck with Chester, buddy. We’ve got a P. F. Chang’s now.”
With that, she stormed off to meet with her new client, who the media had already dubbed the Floorboard-Heart-Buryer-Underer Killer. She knew this because on the way to the interrogation room she saw a special edition of the Tell-Tale Teller with a big headline on the front that said,
FLOORBOARD-HEART-BURYER-UNDERER KILL CAUGHT
Oh, no. What had she gotten herself into?