“You want me to what?” she said, nearly choking on her raspberry-flavored coffee. It was 11 AM. She was fully awake but not yet showered or dressed or fed. She’d spent the morning reading Twitter trying to make sense of the outrage, impotent, her body filling with her own outrage and bile. Her lips and throat were dry. She pondered more coffee. She pondered the pain in her shoulder she’d ignored for months. She pondered the call for submissions and wondered just what do you mean, call for submissions? You talking to me? She pondered emailing the editor to make some small talk, to see how he’s feeling these days. She supposed if she wrote to him he would reply kindly and she could take it as some kind of encouragement to answer the call, but the man is busy and he ain’t got time for loiterers.

She thought about answering the call for submissions, the deadline is plenty of time away. A comfy goal. She wrote a little poem long ago that would be perfect for their upcoming tome, absolutely perfect, but what was the title–what did she call it? Where did she save it? What file? Which drive? Or should she begin a new piece just for their next issue?  Should she search for it now or take a shower first? Or have another cuppa joe? She couldn’t start, do an actual anything without being clean and watered and fed, who can actually doing anything in disgrace?

“What do you mean, call for submissions?” she murmured. Might as well ask me to divert rivers to clean out the king’s stables, she thought. It’s only been 30 years of shit piling up. No biggie. She supposed she’d get started after lunch. No sense trying to find a poem in a haystack on an empty tank. Her mind drifted into wondering what she should wear today, something comfortable, was there enough dirty clothes to take a run to the laundromat yet, and then she thought about putting meat out to thaw for dinner and prep veggies for a nice salad. Better use up the cauliflower before it goes bad…