WHY IS THIS IN THE FILE?
Nobody took responsibility quickly enough.
The editor who rejected my short story was very good in bed. This has made it difficult to sustain my position on the magazine.
I am forty-four. I have survived enough gay dating to know that a pleasant evening does not constitute an endorsement of anybody’s aesthetic program. Nevertheless, when a man has seen you naked, it is irritating to remember that he also found your ending unearned.
The story had been rejected six months before we met. No pending submission. No promise of reconsideration. Our professional relationship consisted of one email in which he regretted that the piece did not quite come alive for him.
At the party, I recognized his name before he recognized mine. He was wearing a jacket that suggested a small independent income. I was wearing the shirt I reserve for occasions when I want strangers to assume I finish things.
We flirted. I told him about the rejection. He looked stricken and said he hoped it had been considerate.
It had called my prose overfurnished.
His apartment contained fourteen cushions.
I counted them while he found the wine. There was also a ladder leaning against a bookshelf, although every book could have been reached by a person of normal height. I should have gone home on principle. Instead, I stayed the night.
The following morning, he asked what I was working on. I said a new story. He said he would love to read it.
This was a generous offer. It was also precisely the kind of sentence I could not be trusted to hear before coffee.
I explained that I did not want the encounter confused with a submission. He said he hadn’t meant that. I said of course. Then we spent several minutes constructing a boundary around an invitation neither of us was now certain had occurred.
We saw each other again. I liked him. He remembered small things I said and had an excellent, unexpectedly filthy laugh. I found myself wanting to impress him in ways for which there is no cover letter.
I did not send him the story.
I sent it elsewhere. Another magazine accepted it. Their editor praised the ending.
When I told him, he was delighted. Annoyingly delighted. He took me to dinner and offered a toast to my success. I had prepared for professional jealousy and was left trying to behave decently in a restaurant.
We are still seeing each other. He has never asked to revisit the first story. I have never mentioned the cushions.
Last week, however, he called me a spare and precise presence in his life.
I know a revision when I hear one.
Fiction from Slutty Confessions. Felix Dross is a Broken Zine persona.
