and then the writer asked her so what have you been working on? She said I’m writing something for Penguin which was a slippery answer, even a fib if your interpretation of the preposition ‘for’ equates to ’request’ or ‘want.’ I’m sending off a submission to Penguin this week would’ve been more accurate. Not that her answer mattered, she told herself.
But of course it does.
******
Before the rain, her garden suffered. The tomatoes slumped against each other, not giving in to the heat but not doing well in spite of it either. The neglected agapanthus had half as many shoots as the same time the previous year; the serpentine-shaped heads had formed and were there ready, among the leaves, to lengthen and bloom. She pulled out the pots from underneath the railing so they could catch the full dumping the news said the city would get over the next two days.
Later, when the rain did come, she stood and watched the drops fall onto the plant and she wondered if that act – beyond even the washing or feeding her children – had been the best, most compassionate, act she’d accomplished all week.
****
And then her mind wandered back to that previous conversation when the writer asked her so what have you been working on? What she should’ve said was I wrote 600 words of an essay the other day or last month I finished a stanza of a poem I think might work but she didn’t want to talk about those because they were unfinished and no one likes an unfinished story. Especially not her family, who suffered when she suffered, which was when she wasn’t writing. So at this point she decided it would be best if she just stopped
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It’s like the question ‘so what do you DO?’
answering ‘writer’ brings out the whole question of ‘and what do you write?’
And that is where I get stuck.
I get to answer, “I work for a newspaper,” and that’s usually where the conversation ends, as we all know newspapers are the source of great evil in the world today.
I’m not kidding; I was called a “soul-sucking vampire who profits off the misery of others.” It was quite a moment.
All that said, chin up, Karen, I’m sure Penguin will be over the moon with your idea, and those other pieces will work themselves out. Sometimes, they just need to marinate for a while.
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