"This has gone far enough,” snapped Maurice Sterling, head editor of The Story Quarterly (TSQ). He paced back and forth in the editors’ room, which was little more than a storage closet. Emily, one of his first readers, sat on an overturned egg crate. Unfortunately she hadn’t bothered to check whether the eggs were still inside, and right now she could feel raw yolk and whites oozing into the bottoms of her brand-new ergonomic heels. But she didn’t want to move and risk disrupting her boss’s rant.
“This Lorna Ergot—this unrelenting, indefatigable so-called writer—this spot of fungus—is ruining our journal! I can’t take it anymore. This is her sixth submission this week. And it’s only Wednesday! Where on earth does she keep coming up with this drivel?”
Despite its cramped quarters, TSQ was one of the most respected literary journals in circulation. Many of its authors had not only been submitted for but actually won Pushcart Prizes, and several had gone on to become bestselling novelists. The journal prided itself on its free submissions policy, which made sure that writers of every economic
background had an equal shot, as well as not ever having implemented one of those very annoying “You can submit only once every three/six/seventeen months” policies.
Maurice continued: “And it can’t be AI, either. I’ve checked. Every tech bro from here to Silicon Valley is trying to seize a spot in our journal by getting Chat GPT or some other godforsaken software to write their corny so-called fiction about lost college sweethearts and brothers who died while playing water polo and all that, but Miss Fungus’s writing, on a pure line level, is both too unique and somehow too foul to have begun as code. It’s so bad that there’s something almost…unholy about it.” He ran a hand across his brow, which was the color and texture of old cheese.
“I fear that we’re not only taking time and attention away from more deserving writers, but also overwhelming our slush readers. As well as our first and second readers! Emily and Johnny, how do you feel about the amount of work that you’ve been facing lately? Don’t bother answering, I can tell by the expressions on your faces. And your peers, Chelsea and Dylan—” (they weren’t there; there wasn’t enough room in the storage closet for five people) “—I’m sure they’re close to breakdowns themselves.”
“Why don’t you simply tell her she’s no good and to stop submitting?” inquired Emily, a little stung at the implication that she was visibly close to a breakdown. Maybe it was the fluorescent lighting. She hoped that it wasn’t also making her skin look like old cheese.
“I’ve taken the Hypocritical Oath!” Maurice roared.
“Don’t you mean the Hippocratic Oath?” she asked, wondering if she had missed her boss’s becoming a doctor.
“No. I mean the Hypo-critical Oath. The oath that all head editors of top-tier literary magazines take—and I invented it. You see, hypo means less than, and critical means….critical. The very formulation of the word is an homage to my passion for linguistics. It’s an oath that requires us to find something to admire in every submission, no matter how small—something, in other words, not to criticize. And let me tell you, with Lorna’s work, sometimes it takes a good two hours to dig something like that out of one of her stories!”
“But doesn’t hypocritical also mean—” began Johnny, a second reader, but Emily stomped on his foot. Johnny looked down in dismay at the raw egg goop covering his wingtip shoe.
“What about banning her from submitting?” Emily suggested.
“No. We can never do that. Remember the guy who submitted to the New Yorker fifty-odd times and finally got in, and his story was the darling of writing critics everywhere for months? It was a Hypocritical Jubilee—nobody had the slightest bit of criticism to give! So who knows…this Lorna Ergot might be the next William Faulkner.” He sighed. “Probably not. But she’d surely find a way to get around a ban. A new email…a new IP address…we can’t lower ourselves to playing games with this woman.”
Emily and Johnny looked at each other. Surely he wasn’t going to expect them to come up with a solution. They were egg-encrusted unpaid readers, for god’s sake.
“So the only course of action remains clear.” Maurice marched over to a section of the wall that appeared blank, reached up and wrestled with something at the top, and finally, with a great clanking and puffing of dust, a small blackboard rattled down. He searched in vain for chalk; not finding it, he turned to Emily.
“Emily,” he said in the most courteous voice she’d ever heard him use, “might I make use of your concealer?”
A minute later, he had used Emily’s bright white concealer (she was already very pale) to draw a dic—a mushroom–on the blackboard. It really looked like a dick, but Maurice insisted that it was a mushroom, for “Miss Fungus.”
As he continued drawing, Emily tried experimentally to raise her feet from the ground. The eggs were already drying and her shoes were well on their way to being stuck there. So, slowly, trying not to make too much noise, she wiggled first one foot, then the other, attempting to loosen the egg but only managing to create soft squelching noises.
Maurice painted an arrow pointing from the dick/mushroom to the right side of the chalkboard, and then began to draw something else. But he was running out of concealer, and managed only a semicircle before the line faded thinner and thinner into nothing.
“What’s that supposed to be?” asked Johnny.
“Death,” Maurice declared grandly. “Just—pretend this is a skull.”
“Shame he used up so much of the concealer when he was drawing the dick,” Johnny whispered to Emily. “Like, did he really need to add a cock ring?”
“That is the ring of the mushroom!” Maurice snapped. “The annulus, in other words!”
“What do you mean by death?” Emily asked. She felt like she should be shocked, but she’d read so many fucked-up stories over the last few months that she felt like she simply had no more shocks to give.
“It’s simple. We cannot ban Lorna Ergot from submitting. We cannot add yet more slush pile readers to deal with her, we cannot impose a prohibitory submissions fee, we cannot change the journal’s name and move across the country. There is only one option left to us. We need to meet the problem at its source—and eradicate it.”
“Like stomping on a mushroom,” Johnny said, nodding wisely, trying to redeem himself from the cock ring comment.
“Like stomping on an egg.” Emily sighed. She tried, gingerly, to raise her foot again. Another squelch. Another sigh.
___
Lorna Ergot prided herself on her tenacity. Not just her tenacity but her creativity, her ability to not only accept all the lemons life had thrown at her but to seize them with open arms, squeeze them into the brightest-tasting lemonade you’d ever seen, throw away the desiccated rinds, and then yell, IS THAT ALL YOU GOT?
Today she was on her way to the grocery store. She supplemented her full-time-writer’s diet with fruit, cheese, and an ungodly amount of meat. Upon entering the store, she found herself facing a table with a few cups on it. It looked like one of those promotional setups that brands did sometimes. She attempted to breeze by, but was blocked by a dark-haired man with a knowing glint in his eye. He nodded to the table. “Won’t you try our special Honey-Nectar drink? It’s free.”
“I hope it would be,” she said. “Except I don’t eat sugar. Or drink it,” she added. “Clogs the writing gears.”
He nodded like he understood. “I totally get that. I’m something of a writer myself! What about our, uh, brand-new Focus drink? It’s got cucumber, celery, lettuce, and…spinach. It’s about the healthiest drink you could ever have.”
Lorna actually got excited as he began to list the ingredients, but then her heart dropped at the mention of spinach. “I’m terribly sorry, but spinach has histamines, and I have MCAS. I can’t eat spinach, mushrooms, citrus, tomatoes…”
“No mushrooms?” the man gasped in what appeared to be genuine surprise, and then clapped a hand over his mouth, his eyes darting from side to side.
“Why is that such a surprise? I hate mushrooms anyway.”
“No—nothing—I just think that everyone should enjoy mushrooms—” he choked out. “Perhaps you’d like to try our tea? Everyone likes tea—”
“Thanks very much, but I’ll pass,” she said, edging away. What a strange fellow. And who wore wingtip shoes to work at a supermarket? It looked like he’d already gotten some gross stuff on them—dried egg whites, by the looks of it. But at least she had some new material for a story now. Odd brand ambassadors who attempted to ensnare passers-by with the queerest concoctions. Yes, she’d start work on that one right away, as soon as she reached home.
She wrote parts of it in her head as she progressed down the aisle to the meat department. Time to get some fresh, juicy slabs of steak. But just as she reached the butcher’s station, she felt a tap on her shoulder. A blonde woman asked her if she wouldn’t possibly like to sample some better cuts of meat. “This is just the mediocre stuff,” she said in an undertone. “We keep the real fresh stuff in the back.”
“In the back?” Lorna peered over the woman’s shoulder. There didn’t seem to be much of a “back” to the store, other than a dimly-lit passageway that led deeper into the bowels of the building. “Why wouldn’t you keep the freshest meat out here, where there are more customers?”
“Because it’s colder in the back,” the woman said quickly. “Much colder. It’s the way the store is designed. It’s so cold that the meat is as fresh as it was when it was sliced directly off the cow—or the lamb—or whatever kind of animal you like.”
“It sounds tempting, definitely—” And then the realization hit her like a blast of frigid air. The price. Of course. Meat that was so fresh, and kept so carefully preserved, must be at least twice the cost of the normal stuff. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, but I’m on a budget. There’s no way I could afford your fancy meat in the back. So I guess I’ll have to make do with the, ah, mediocre stuff right here.” She gave an apologetic smile.
“Mediocre stuff?” The butcher, who had been at the other end of the section up until now, came storming up to them from behind the display case. “What’s going on? There’s nothing wrong with our meat! I’ll have you know it’s premium, Certified Humane, USDA Prime and Choice! And who are you?” He directed this last bit at the woman beside Lorna, but when Lorna turned, all she saw was the back of the woman’s head disappearing into a swarm of customers.
Funny. They weren’t as organized over here as they usually were. Lorna considered asking the butcher about this mysterious back section where they kept the super-frozen carcasses. But something about his expression pushed the words back into her throat, and she was only able to smile meekly and ask for her usual twelve pounds of steak.
All throughout Lorna’s walk home, the last words the saleswoman had used—or whatever kind of animal you like—kept ringing in her ears. There might be a story there too, yes. Humans were animals, were they not? She hadn’t written a story about cannibalism for a while—it had been at least two weeks—and so her mind began to swim with ideas, ideas that began to shape themselves into words and then into sentences. She was so busy thinking about all the stories she was soon to write that she didn’t even notice the man racing towards her—at least not until it was too late.
“OOF!” Their bodies connected with a thud. Lorna wavered a bit but didn’t fall, as the two bags she carried—six pounds of meat in one hand, six in the other—held her steady. The man, on the other hand, fell heavily backward onto the pavement, all the wind knocked out of him.
“Oh my gosh. Are you all right?” Lorna peered down at the man, who was writhing on the ground like an insect that had gotten all its limbs plucked off. The image was starkly terrifying—a butterfly with its wings peeled away, a spider without any legs—and she took a step backwards. The mental image was so vivid that it began to overtake her, and she had a thought—the same thought she had at least six but sometimes as many as twenty times a day—I must write.
Forgetting the stranger, she hurried inside her house. When she deposited the grocery bags onto the counter, she found yet another surprise—a huge knife was buried in one of the bags of steak, almost to the hilt. “Well, I do have my own knives, you know,” she muttered crossly. “What must they think of me at that store? Do I really look like someone who buys twelve pounds of meat a week to just gnaw on it?”
These words immediately gave rise to another mental image, one mixed with her earlier idea—cannibalism without knives or forks, just people chewing on each other’s leg bones. And that could tie into the image of the man writhing on the pavement—oh, the man on the pavement! She should check if he was okay.
Lorna opened her door and peered out into the street, but to her relief, the man seemed all right: he had already gotten up and was walking into the distance. His steps were hard and fast and he was punching one fist into the other hand over and over—even from here she could hear the meaty slap of it. As well a furious string of curses.
“Sorry!” she called, but she wasn’t sure if he even heard her.
Bemused, she watched him disappear. But then she began to smile. It had been an unexpectedly interesting day, and she had so much to write about. She could sense at least four or five stories tugging at her right now, clamoring in her brain, demanding that she write them down. And maybe one of these stories would finally get her accepted into TSQ—into her dream journal.
Maybe.
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