A terrifyingly beautiful New York City woman is either preparing the most exquisite, slow-burn revenge murder of all time or has lost her goddamn mind, the New York Post reports today.

Actually, the woman herself reports: Post writer Stephanie Smith has revealed herself—proudly—as the deranged mind behind 300sandwiches.com, a website on which the blogger details her efforts to make her boyfriend 300 sandwiches, so that he will deem her worthy of making his sandwiches for the rest of her life (by proposing to her). It is a modern A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with added sandwich photos, without the rights of woman.

"My boyfriend, Eric, is the gourmet cook in our relationship," the article opens,

but he’d always want me to make him a sandwich. Each morning, he would ask, “Honey, how long you have been awake?” “About 15 minutes,” I’d reply. “You’ve been up for 15 minutes and you haven’t made me a sandwich?”

We learn that, to Stephanie Smith's boyfriend Eric (whom she describes as "an Alexander Skarsgård look-alike" and who, it must be said, bears a passing resemblance to True Blood's "Eric" [Season 1, hair only]), sandwiches are "like kisses or hugs. Or sex," perhaps in the sense that they are something he demands a woman submit to him nightly before he gives her a diamond.

We learn that the couple moved in together one year ago, settling into "a sleek place in Brooklyn" that would soon, by God, be filled with Stephanie's homemade sandwiches, else she planned to die a spinster.

We learn that Eric exclaims things like "Babes!"

Eric devoured the sandwich as if it were a five-star meal, diving in with large, eager bites. “Babes, this is delicious!” he exclaimed.

Not long after that exclamation, Eric exclaims again:

“Honey, you’re 300 sandwiches away from an engagement ring!”

The story is like something out of a fairytale, one of those weird old German ones you can't read to kids, where a peasant girl's stepmother forces her to make 300 sandwiches for the Devil, and then a series of horrible things happen to the girl, and at the end of the story she freezes to death.



It's never exactly clear whether the mission Stephanie undertakes is a conscious attempt to satirize something (...women?), or just another testament in God's endless troll against the race of man. At times, the website simply reads like an inflammatory text devised to anger sandwiches. (“Spread avocado on toast. Slice eggs, then layer on top of avocado.” HMM, OK.)

She calculates that, if she makes Eric three sandwiches a week, every week, until the Apocalypse, by the time she finishes the challenge she will be “deep into” her thirties. Perhaps by then the movie version of this story, which Stephanie's Dear Diary-style blog posts obviously anticipate ("Instead, I am probably the only fool that cried after pole dancing class," she writes, above a recipe for Sloppy Joes), will be in pre-production.

So, yes. Stephanie is game for the 300 sandwich challenge! What the hell else is she doing? (Writing for the Post?) Not getting married, that’s for sure.

Maybe I needed to show him I could cook to prove that I am wife material. If he wanted 300 sandwiches, I’d give him 300 sandwiches — and I’d blog about it. I bought the 300sandwiches.com domain name and a Nikon DSLR.

As Stephanie sets about achieving her life’s greatest legacy (making many, many sandwiches), she suffers under the withering common sense of her friends, who call her a "Stepford Wife" and decry Eric’s mumbled non-proposal as "chauvinistic." Stephanie addresses these criticisms with an agile, erudite argument, or, anyway, she would if she weren't so busy making sandwiches!!!

My own mother was doubtful. “Honey, can you even cook?” she asked.

She can't! But everyone—who lives in her apartment or who is a commodities trader with all his money in sandwich futures—is rooting for her!

But the piece soon takes a darker tone. A few dozen sandwiches in, SANDWICHES!!!! stops being something Stephanie does for love and starts being something she does to avoid the vicious tongue-lashings of her stepmother boyfriend.

I made sandwiches to get myself out of the doghouse — like No. 67, a scrambled egg, smoked salmon and chive creation that combined some of Eric’s favorite things to make up for my being 45 minutes late for dinner the night before. Even after covering movie premieres or concerts for Page Six, I found myself stumbling into the kitchen to make Eric a sandwich while I still had on my high heels and party dress.

Those lines aren’t a prelude to the triumphant part of the story where Stephanie prepares Eric a special sandwich consisting of a box jellyfish on a bed of oleander leaves with hemlock garnish—a sandwich which, Stephanie will later testify, she had no idea would poison Eric so swiftly he would expire where he sat (though her browser history will suggest otherwise). They’re just part of the narrative of Sandwich’s charming life. I mean Stephanie’s.

To date, Stephanie has made 176 sandwiches, which means she only has 124 more until the Goblin King will accept her as his wretched bride. For now, all her eager public can do is speculate about what will happen on the evening of sandwich 299.

Will Eric reveal that this challenge was devised as a brain teaser, to see if Stephanie could get a job at Google? (A: On day one, prepare a giant PB&J, and then cut it into 300 pieces.) Will Stephanie awake in the night and, using her serrated bread knife, slice Eric's body to pieces, for use as the meat in the 300 sandwiches she will serve at his memorial service? (“Looks like I finally made him 300 sandwiches!” she will shriek to the night.) Will Stephanie be disqualified from the competition on a technicality since, Eric will point out, “air sandwich” (two pieces of bread served with nothing; sandwich #298) does not really qualify as a sandwich? Who can say?

Maybe they’ll just end up getting married. The rest of Stephanie's life surely cannot be any more degrading than this.

[Image via 300 Sandwiches/@StefSmith30]