Waste Not (In Particular My Time....) by Alma Katsu

A while back, when the English Major first convinced the other two idiots to join this short story experiment, I (the resident Illiterate) went on a buying binge. Fueled by a rare moment of optimism, I thought, What the hell, I can read 365 short stories in a year.
If you were wondering how that's going, you haven't read the previous posts....

In that delusional state, I picked up a horror anthology called Other Terrors. I saw the subtitle but, like most things not spoon-fed to me like I’m a teething infant, it didn’t quite register:
“An inclusive anthology.”

Inclusive of what? I probably wondered once, somewhere in the fog of purchase justification. It clicked eventually—maybe in the Barnes & Noble parking lot where I bought the damn thing. Inclusive. Like inclusive.

I’m not going to go full rant mode here, but let’s just say I’m unconvinced about the glorious transformation of the term over the past few years.

So in that spirit—no punches pulled.

Waste Not was a waste of something. Namely: my time.
At no point did I care about the story. It dragged for 20 pages when it could’ve been told in 3. No character development. No compelling subplot. Just a bland, lazy bit of horror-by-numbers. I saw the ending coming by page 3, even though the author tried really hard to be clever about it.

How this made it into any anthology, inclusive or otherwise, is beyond me. Maybe they needed filler?

F- is me being generous.