Months ago, a handful of us from the
submitted pieces to a flash-fiction contest that promised to provide feedback, no matter if your piece placed or not. This morning, I received that feedback. See below for my submission which was supposed to be no more than 1,000 words in length, and must reference two randomized personalized prompts I was given at the outset: “glacier” and “cyborg.”I was officially diagnosed a couple of years ago, but I’ve suffered from self-induced cyborg syndrome since the age of eight when the conifers couldn’t protect me from the violence of mothering. The difference between being mothered and being smothered is the difference between Mama’s Boys and Immobilized Men.
“What if you had a mother who loved you instead of. . . suffocated you?” a question my third girlfriend asked two days before I broke up with her.
Suffocated. As if that was the minimalness of it.
By body.
By breasts.
By what was called love.
If I’d attempted to answer my almost-ex honestly, I may have said, “I have no fucking clue, Amanda, but what I can tell you is that I don’t date women with bra sizes bigger than A.”
My snide defensiveness was the obstacle to any productive communication in my conversational imagination. Instead, I just said, “It’s not really worth thinking about. Maybe curry for dinner?”
Would she have understood what I meant about my big-breasted trauma anyway? Did I even understand? I’m adept at not lying while never truly answering, better known as Roundabout Honesty.
The suffocation that accompanies being held too long in the gelatinous softness of your mother’s bosom is akin to drowning in a flood of your own terrified tears and pungent preadolescent sweat.
I decided to go cyborg the night the needles of the pine tree compassed themselves toward me. But they too were tethered to the stickiness of their mother.
We are the ever unreachable.
We are the ever unreached.
And so, the panic swelled my insides, as if my whole body was a mouth on the wet verge of vomit.
And my fear tumesced my limbs, as if my appendages were cocks on the cusp of erotic compression.
“You tried,” I said to the pines at celluloid dawn.
“We did,” the needles yowled in the wind of morning’s futility.
I spent that morning getting adept at self-inflicted surgery. Snipping away the asphyxiation of flesh and the memory of the moment I realized safety isn’t for everyone. Stitching up the metaphor of meat and muscle.
Until I could remember, without feeling.
Until I could live, without experiencing.
Going cyborg meant substituting data for sensation and metal for flesh.
Decades later and not much of me is left. However my hair remains curly, a physical side effect of violation. The straight-haired ones are relaxed, with no crimp or kink in their strands. Yet, my scalp-born filaments twist and curl into the double helix of DNA, and maybe my pain actually makes me superior.
Pines are planted to break the wind. A fortress of poke and sap.
But can they attenuate the damage of floods?
Glaciers are the gaolers of water.
Potential energy vs kinetic energy.
They wait.
They gather.
They hunt.
Threatening melt.
I went about my days glacially. Slow and potent.
I went about my days in cyborgian security.
No hurt. No despair. No embarrassment. No hate.
Tho no joy. No exuberance. No excitement. No love.
Where my cock was all kinetic, my heart was pure potential.
How safe and contained those days felt. The ability to laugh with a disconnected lightheartedness. The ability to manipulate people into loving me from just the right distance. Nothing could bring me to tears, tho nothing could bring me to climax either. All rock and no release. Orgasms are an uncontrolled mess anyway, a vulnerable loosening in front of another, a giving over of power; like letting someone else drive. The terribleness of just the thought of it drips from my stalactite teeth filling a choke in my throat.
My love of curry was one other aspect of me that remained unchanged. Years after Amanda and I shared our last curry, I sat alone in the Thai spot down the block from my apartment where the tiny elderly owner and I enjoyed the silent but stable relationship of Restauranteur and Regular. Few words passed between us, but she cared for me, and I was grateful. She would fill my water, bring my tea, and take care to give me the amount of spice I needed rather than the amount I wanted.
What was left of my body was still cold from the ambient winter that waited outside because metal is cold-blooded. It’s strange how loneliness has a feeling, but I amputated the feeling long ago, so now I can only relate loneliness to the vague smell of mildew. Bleach, though, is a smell of cared for. So when the aroma of chlorine crept its invisible way down the corridor, I knew the old lady had started her nightly ritual of “putting away the restaurant.” Just as my tea was about to give up the last of its ghostly warmth, she came to refill me. I looked at her. My eyes vacant and mouth empty. She patted me on the hand; two appendages of time layered in a cake of vein and bone. She had poured so many teas in her lifetime that she could abandon the spout to look at only at me.
“You are very American. You forget connection.” Her voice was ever staccato and quick, like the pounding of a dozen nails in a house being built far away.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You forgot harmony. You can’t amputate yourself any longer. I am your neighbor, and my house has no fence.”
She removed her hand from mine and placed it solidly at the center of my back, all the while allowing me to watch her moves as if she intuitively knew about my startle reflex.
“My house has no fence,” she said once again.
As the “ssss” of her fence disappeared into the steam of the tea, a rush of flood surged through my once-upon-a-time eyes, and I soaked her level chest with years of tears.
Here’s the feedback I received from the judges.
Judge 1: The writing style is interesting with some good use of imagery, "celluloid dawn" is fantastic. It's interesting to use a seemingly unlikable and misogynistic protagonist. Unfortunately, I think that works against the piece in this instance, as I struggled to connect with this character or their goals. Also, I found parts of this story to be incoherent. It would have benefitted from expanding on the scenes, as on reading, it feels more of a series of brief, unconnected images rather than a cohesive story.
Judge 2: Points for some of the ideas, but the story feels a little all over the place and doesn't have a coherent flow. There is some great imagery but the story as a whole could have used more passes to improve their cohesion.
They think I wrote an unlikeable misogynistic protagonist? That was jarring. And they want me to expand on scenes in a 1,000 word piece? And to me, it is a complete story of a boy violated who closes himself off to cope only to be released by a WOMAN.
I’m used to hearing that my writing is weird or even jarring or confusing. But I guess I expect the reader to do a little work, a little problem solving, a little putting together of the pieces. Maybe 100 people will read this and agree with the judges, but maybe just a few of you will also bring your own skills and mind to the tale and get it. I don’t mind when people don’t like my writing, but too often the feeling of being “ungotten” is just the worst. It’s alienating. And yet, this isn’t uncommon feedback for the few times I’ve attempted to submit.
So the prompt was glaciers and cyborgs? You wrote a completely unique take on those words by using cold metal and frozen humanity to describe a man unable to love who purposefully shuts down and controls his emotions. He is freed from his prison by the tea lady’s words and embrace What on earth did the first judge read? I admit I had to look up the word deliquesce but come on man, how did they arrive at misogyny? As to the second maybe they want a more cookie cutter approach to a very short story. 🤷♀️ I loved it and it is unlikely there was another entry with your style. As a bit of an old tea lady myself, I embrace it!
The judges sound like they read a completely different story than the one you wrote. Your protagonist deserves empathy and even pity, but not judgement. And yes, there were times where the story wasn’t super coherent. But I read it more as a prose poem than a traditional short story.
In short, fuck them judges.