FROM THE SLUSH PILE: By Lee Blevins
Monday, August 29th, 2011Dear Editor,
You have rejected me for the last time. I shall never send another story to Dark Mannequin magazine again. You don’t have to tell me twice. Well, you did and then some, but I get the message. I’m a hack. So it goes.
A hack! You’ll see soon just what a hack is. What is it that you don’t like about me? Is it that I’m not a big city boy with big city characters? Is it that I’m not a carbon copy of Stephen King or Clive Barker or Ramsey Campbell? Is it that I’m too good for your magazine? I’ll ask you in person, soon enough.
I know where you live. That’s a cliché but it’s true. You live with your fiancée, a certain Miss Keaton (is she related to the Great Stoneface? I’ll ask her in person, soon enough), at 377 Hood Drive in Cincinnati, Ohio. Your neighborhood is nice and white and suburban, isn’t it? You don’t feel the recession. You don’t feel the pressure of success.
I know you don’t. Dark Mannequin isn’t your job, it’s your hobby. You work for Allied Consultant Company, spewing out political advertisements for Democrats and Republicans. Are you aware they are the same thing? Of course, you are. You’re a cynic. And a sadist. How else could reject a story as good as “All the Secret Agents”? I put my fucking life blood into that, those characters are my children and that prose is my home. You shit over all equivalently.
You only edit on the weekends, making writers wait for excruciating periods of time for you to reject them. You only publish the ones who’ve already made it plus a couple token minorities once every four issues. I’ve seen Luke Ellington’s stories in three issues now, in the past year alone. His stories are shit but I’ll tell him that in person, too. He lives in Blanchester, Ohio. That’s close to you. Maybe you went to high school together. That would explain how such sordid purple prose made its way into your magazine.
“The wind blew smoke and water over the lighthouse keeper’s perpendicular head, belaying the doom that rose in spirals of delight bound to plummet into Lovecraftian waters.” That’s shit. I wrote better than that when I was 12 and copying Edgar Allan Poe. And as shitty as that is, it’s his best story. The second one was plainly a very poor attempt at Bentley Little with a terrible title (what the fuck does “Green House Hill” even have to do with the story, it’s set in the fucking woods?) and the third one was something a stoned rapper would put to paper when he planned on branching out. Not even a black stoned rapper, a white one. A second rate Beastie Boys. “The man in the can put his fingers in the fan.” Do you understand?
I’ve seen you. You’re getting fat though you try to keep the pounds away at a Guido-heavy gym downtown. The annual fee is five hundred dollars. I know. I went and asked. You don’t make the kind of money where five hundred bucks for a gym pass is reasonable without fucking someone in the ass. I’m going to give you a taste of that medicine you so like to dispense.
I watched you and Miss Keaton at the bar last night. She rubbed your penis through your khakis as an “indie-rock” band played five songs in forty minutes. You were right at home amid all those hipsters, weren’t you? You discussed politics and graphic novels (wouldn’t dare call them comic books, would you?) with poor college professors and failed painters.
As the last song played you struck up a conversation with a long-haired drifter. You found out you two shared a mutual appreciation for Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker’s novels, if not his politics. The drifter offered to get you high, you agreed and you smoked a thin joint in the alleyway behind a dumpster smelling of cabbage and cat shit.
I know all these things and more. I know what you think at night. I know you even feel guilty about rejecting me and countless other writers who want nothing more than to connect with someone in an absurd world. We are cut from the same cloth. The only difference, you have sold out.
There is only one literary class below editors. That is critics. At least, you are not one of them. Though it may have been better for you, in the long run, if you were. There is good and evil in this world, any romantic would tell you that. I am good and you are evil, any romantic would tell you that, as well.
I have given you more thought in one and two third pages then you ever gave me. I have given back a personal rejection letter, all I ever received were forms. “Your submission is not right for our magazine,” but “keep writing and please feel free to send us more of your work.”
Your submission, dear editor, is not right for our world but keep trying and please feel free to send us more of yourself. When I have you and your fiancée where I want you, our places will change. You will be the one seeking acceptance and I will be the one doing the rejecting.
I will write my masterpiece in blood.
Sincerely,
An Anonymous Hack
rejectionsensitivity@gmail.com
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©2011 Lee Blevins
