Amy Inspired - Bethany Pierce [4]
Dear Author,
Thank you for sending us your manuscript. After careful consideration we have decided that we will not be able to publish it.
Although we would like to send an individual response to everything, and particularly to those who request comment, the small size of our staff prevents us from doing so.
Sincerely,
THE EDITORS
The rejection was a week old, but I had yet to file it away. It had come with a coupon for a subscription to the magazine. I balled up the coupon and threw it at the wastebasket, missing by a foot.
I took the to-do pad Mom had given me for Christmas, a stack of carefully lined paper with the heading To Do Today typed cheerfully in blue. Beneath buy milk, fruit, lunch stuff; organize student exemplary files; and finish grading 11:00 essays, I wrote new batch of submissions—mail Monday.
I also tabulated the rejections in my blue binder. There were two columns: submissions on the left, rejections on the right. Finding Exatrope magazine, I recorded the date November 7 opposite the date I’d mailed the story, placing a red check mark in the margin beside the magazine’s name for good measure.
Tapping my pencil along the titles, I counted the number of magazines that had sent this particular story back. I did this every time I received a rejection.
Twenty-seven. For one story.
When I quit my job at Millbury’s (the twenty-sixth best elementary school social studies textbook publishing house in the country) to pursue a life of writing, I had specific visions of my new life: Between scribbling works of literary genius I would attend art galleries and work in soup kitchens, walking busily from one matter of importance to another, curls billowing in the wind à la Carrie Bradshaw. I had not imagined pulling all-nighters grading student essays with thesis statements like “In the Age before the Depression, America reeked benefits at the expense of the countries poor.
Dejectedly I gathered my things. I found the empty, flattened Cheetos bag stored in my pencil drawer. Everett and I had been passing it back and forth since May. At his desk I examined the photographs of his dog Karenina. The purebred Shih Tzu was the one thing Everett loved more than books. There were piles of books crowding his desk, leaning skyscrapers of his private world. I slid the Cheetos bag into page 341 of The Brothers Karamazov and clamped the novel shut.
Home was less than half an hour by foot, but it was too cold for a walk. I took the cement steps down the steep hill adjacent to the Humanities Building to catch the purple bus line. From my seat in the back I watched the campus pass by outside the window.
Copenhagen, population 4,569, was hidden in the cornfields of Ohio just seventy miles from Columbus. When I told my brother I was moving to Copenhagen he thought I meant Denmark. Copenhagen was not the only town guilty of borrowing its name. Ohio was full of them. There was London, Ohio, and Oxford, Ohio; there was Dresden, Sparta, Manchester, and Lebanon. It was as if many Ohio cities, like many Ohio residents, wanted to be somewhere else.
The bus followed campus two blocks before turning right toward downtown. Main Street had all the romantic essentials: cobblestone streets, window shops with candy cane-striped awnings, and gas stations that still chimed to alert the station manager of new customers. The locals lived peacefully, if not a little resentfully, beside the crowd of students that kept their town afloat on the expensive appetites of well-groomed consumers. When school was in session, the noise and color of youth obliterated any semblance of normal small-town life. The first week of class the students wiped the Wal-Mart shelves clean; college kids ran all shop cash registers; all downtown waitresses were younger than twenty-two; and frat boys outnumbered mothers at the grocery store on a Friday afternoon. We lived on a private planet populated entirely by the barely post-pubescent who plotted their dreams carefully on the black and white lines of academic Day Planners.
My housemate, Zoë, and I maintained