Untitled. For now.
Rejections deserve fresh air too
This piece was recently rejected .The writing challenge:“Find what you love and let it kill you” (Bukowski)
When I told my writing group the piece hadn’t been chosen, their response was immediate: “what a perfect moment to work on some of your challenges writing short stories”. You have to admire the optimism and support of a group of people who mostly write smutty tales.
After that conversation, I sketched an outline for a longer version of the story. I’m actually looking forward to the challenge of pushing it further and to the discipline required to keep my ADHD from wandering off halfway through.
Rejections, like provenance, become part of the record.
So here it is.
A provenance altered by half a sentence. A date adjusted in pencil.
The first time she felt the tremor in her hand and kept writing anyway. The headaches began behind her eyes and settled somewhere permanent. The cough followed. A metallic taste she could not rinse away.
By then, her earlier work looked unfinished beside the new pieces. Thin. Amateur. She stripped one down and started over. Adjusted the date. Borrowed a history from someone who would not contest it.
The first time it sold, she did not go to the opening. She watched the listing go live instead, refreshing until the red dot appeared beside the price, until the work found a new home in someone else’s climate-controlled certainty.
Her gloves dissolved faster now. Solvent worked through the seams at the cuffs, leaving her fingers cold long before she finished. The earlier work stacked behind her in quiet accusation.
Tonight she was sketching the one that would replace it. Measuring the proportions from memory. Practicing the crackle of age along the edges. Mixing the pigments until the colour felt appropriately exhausted, until it settled into something that might have always been there.
Perfection required patience. One altered date. One borrowed name. One version that held.
By morning the solvent would eat through the cuffs of her gloves again.
She laid the finished surface beneath the lamp and waited for it to fail, or hold, or pretend convincingly enough to become true to anyone else.
She would not watch the next sale. She would not attend the opening. She would wait for the email. The quiet confirmation. The transfer that proved belief could be purchased.
The catalogue note would do the rest, smoothing the timeline, fixing the hand that made it, naming a past that could not argue.