The great literary experiment has failed. I am in ruins. The letter is cold, impersonal, without even the expenditure of paper a physical rejection would require.
Dear Aristo,
On behalf of the New Fiction team, I’d like to apologise for our late reply due to the unprecedented global situation. Thank you for giving me the chance to read A Numismatics of Decay. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s a good fit for our magazine. Due to the large volume of submissions we receive, I can’t provide individual feedback for your submission.
Please feel free to submit to us again if you have something that fits our content. Before you submit a new piece, please check our Guidelines for Submissions and Style Guide for any changes in availability, requirements, or price.
Yours sincerely,
Walter Arkady
Editor-in-Chief
New Fiction
It goes into an email folder alongside every other response letter I’ve received. My mail client helpfully tells me that “every other” means 32. As if on cue, my phone trills. And, of course, it’s her.
Well?
I dismiss the notification unread and try to sleep. I was stupid, stupid to bet everything on this latest submission, stupid to boast about it, stupid to argue with her about its likelihood and my viability as a writer, stupid to tell her that the deadline for responses was tomorrow. It would have been better if I had never received any responses, if I remained an unknown quantity, mysterious, with unknown but possibly limitless potential. As it stood, eighteen years of “trying to make it in art” had earned me three hundred and twenty seven dollars, far outstripped by even my most demeaning stints as a freelance copywriter. Enough, I suppose, to buy a last-gen budget smartphone if I needed one. Sleep isn’t forthcoming, my ratty yellow sheets having acquired a sweat-laden, uncomfortably smooth texture. I’m out of time, and now I’m locked inside.
Years of failure tumble through my mind, mixing and merging with years of mediocrity. I’m starting to think that Karl Marx has personally screwed me over with his socio-economic theory. What good is understanding the world when you can’t do anything about it? My phone chirps again, telling me of war in Sudan, Yemen, disease ravaging Asia, brutality in America and chaos in Europe. There is, above all, the impossible sense that the world is being torn apart, and that you are being torn apart with it, helpless to move or even cry out.
Later that day I roll out of bed and tear down the Soviet-era print of Red Square on my wall. I resolve to never spend another second of my life pursuing meaningless, impossible, totalising theorems of change. Instead of playing at activism, I would take up passivism: Just going with the flow.
It would be much easier than trying to do anything about this mess of a world, anyhow.