(April 16th 2021)
68 pages
 
 
“He painted two pigs with the numbers ‘one’ and ‘three’ on them and turned them loose in the office. One spent twenty minutes painfully choking on a dry eraser, before finally dying outside of the boardroom. The other remains unaccounted for, but the office smells like rot.”
 
Three corporate hours have been allotted to commemorate the life of enigma, Bill Motluck. Employee memories of his life are crudely recounted onto a dusty projector. No one has ever been quite sure of his purpose. No one is quite sure who wrote the PowerPoint...but it seems to be exposing them all, one by one.
 
Sample:
 
Slide 6
Every few months another vertebrae collapsed
Depositing bone matter into the soiled fabric
Of an outdated chair
The permanent migration to the floor
Was unpleasant at first
But after some time, I realized I would rather lay than sit
So I cherished the destruction
And fantasized about the day in which
My head would disappear amongst my shapeless skin folds and
Become lubricant for the plastic wheels that would propel the
Next resident into a similar
State of indifference
 
“In his wildly imaginative chapbook, PowerPoint Eulogy, Chicago writer and visual artist Mark Wilson paints a picture of corporate culture—and humanity at large—that is both soul-crushingly bleak and hilariously demented. Divided into forty-four presentation “slides”, the story centers on the memories a group of unnamed employees have of their recently deceased co-worker, Bill Motluck—a man so bland he enjoyed small talk about skim milk, and so desperate to fit in he once rented a newborn for Bring Your Kid to Work Day. Should we give in to the impulse to laugh at poor Bill, or feel sympathy for his plight? As the stories and little revelations pile up, it becomes harder and harder to decide—and the tension this creates is what ultimately makes this one-of-a-kind collection so impossible to put down. I laughed, I winced, I loved it”- Mark Rader, Author of ‘The Wanting Life’