I Have Become Accustomed To Rejection

Outstanding Submissions: 20

Rejections: 1, personal form

Today, I was rejected from Cream City Review who really enjoyed my story but didn’t feel it was right for CCR. I know this rejection quite well as PANK uses the same submission manager. We like you, just not in that way. Still, they encourage me to continue submitting work to them in the future and I shall. It’s not me, after all. It’s them.

Writer, promote thyself! Super Arrow is a fine new publication. They fly straight and true and have been kind enough to include my work in their debut issue. I was also interviewed by David Erleweine at the JMWW blog.

I like to go grocery shopping late at night when the store is  sparsely populated by people who work third shift and college students buying off brand frozen pizzas and resupplying their alcohol stores before the 2 am cut off.  I love watching couples at the grocery store. More often than not, the man pushes the cart and the woman walks just behind him, her chin practically resting against his shoulder as if she’s peering through that empty space in the curve of his neck to see what’s ahead. Sometimes, her hand rests in the small of her back, or he’s holding on to the hem of her coat. When I see couples like this, I want to cry.

Sometimes, when I’m in the grocery store, I pretend I am an alien and walking through the grocery store is my first experience with the foodstuffs of the human creatures all around me. The array of food options at the grocery store is bewildering. Does not compute. The variety of pretzels makes no sense. Do we really need that many different kinds of pretzels? Tonight, I saw pretzels in the shape of tiny footballs. The sight of them made me sick to my stomach.