Nailed

The nail in the foyer was already bending under the weight of my failures, which would have been poetic if it weren’t a structural hazard. Penny nail, roofing nail, some kind of nail, I never learned the terminology.

I only knew I had stolen it from my landlord’s toolbox and driven it into the foyer wall because the house itself required a central load-bearing point. Every time a rejection arrived, I printed it, pressed it flat like a holy relic, and hung it on the metal hook that held everything upright.

The studs behind the drywall were rejection letters. The subfloor was rejection letters. The trim, the crown molding, the pantry shelving, all of it was rejection letters. Upstairs and down, the place was framed in “unfortunatelys” and “we regret to inform yous,” reinforced with the kind of disappointment that ages well.

The only room untouched was the wet-bar kitchen in the basement, the one I hadn’t entered since Bernard bent me over the counter two years ago while I closed my eyes and pictured Bernard the Elf from The Santa Clause. It wasn’t him I avoided. It was the life I once imagined for myself, the one that glowed like Christmas magic before adulthood turned everything into cheap drywall. Then he got promoted and moved to the city, and I stayed upstairs with my letters and my nail, waiting for the collapse that would let me begin.

Upstairs was already held together with rejections. The hideaway bench in the dining room was upholstered with “thank you for thinking of us,” and the bathroom mirror wore a frame of “unfortunately, this isn’t quite right for our publication.” Even the hallway floor had a soft spot made of three consecutive noes from Paris Review. Lately the papers had started to curl at the edges, yellowing like old receipts. I’d have to replace them soon. Before the house sagged or the bench collapsed or the mirror admitted what it had seen.

But none of that mattered. The basement came first. The wet-bar kitchen waited like a bad memory I kept promising to face once I had the proper materials. Which was to say the proper failures. I was one good rejection away from feeling brave.

At night I mainline coffee and torch cigarettes like I’m trying to win a prize for accelerated lung collapse. I scroll Chill Subs and Sub Grinder until my eyes feel like overworked interns, sending work anywhere with an open call and a half-functioning inbox. The editors all become characters in my head. Parul reads slush while kneeling in a salt circle she won’t explain. Roxane balances her laptop on one knee, eating mango slices like communion. Whoever screens for The Sun does it from the middle of an editor-only lake in a canoe that creaks whenever a writer gets their hopes up.

I lob stories at them like flare guns, reload, fire again. The frenzy feels half-religious and fully pathetic but I keep going, because devotion is cheaper than therapy and marginally more productive.

During the day I pretend to be someone with a healthy relationship to stability. I answer work emails. I eat lunch at appropriate hours. On my breaks I scroll Pinterest like a suburban divorcée planning a second-life makeover. I build renovation boards for the basement wet bar, pinning tile samples and light fixtures I’ll never buy because the only currency the house accepts is failure.

My coworkers think I’m calm. Sweet, even. The kind of woman who wears soft cardigans and has favorite teas. I let them believe it. Let them believe I’m the kind of person who renovates because she wants to, rather than because she’s spiritually held together with the literary equivalent of eggshells. It’s almost convincing until I remember that normal people build moodboards out of optimism. I build mine out of dread and the faint hope that if I look stable long enough, I’ll trick myself into becoming it.

The nail in the foyer keeps bowing under the weight of my ambition, which is rich considering it is made of failure. I check it between submissions like some people check on rising bread, hoping for collapse. It trembles but never drops. It wants something larger. A no with pedigree. A no printed on paper thick enough to bruise. Something prestigious and pretentious as fuck, the kind of rejection that smells faintly of MFA debt, New York rent, and a gallery opening where everyone pretends to understand conceptual sculpture. That is the no that will finally bring the nail down and give me permission to begin the basement.

Bill texts that he made dinner and has a new Lego set to show me, which means he assembled a miniature Scandinavian bookstore while drinking electrolyte water and listening to acoustic covers of emo classics. He is kind. He knows I like homemade kombucha and doesn’t tease me for it. He buys the good toilet paper. He is also optimized for sleep rather than thrill, which has its own quiet usefulness.

He is a connoisseur of pubic hair. He loves the feel of it and the way it bounces. He loves the look of it and how it carries a touch of wisdom and elegance. And because I have anxiety, I keep mine trimmed. I go into the shower with a cheap Bic razor and shape it into a neat triangle with the same precision an expensive suburb uses to edge sidewalks, everything perfectly straight and obedient.

And because Bill is boring in the precise, tolerable way that makes life feel less like an electrical fire, I go. His apartment is decorated with completed Lego sets that look like architectural models built by a man who fears disorder more than death. He is gentle and earnest and calls me pretty like it’s a fact he memorized for a test.

When he fucks me from behind on his corduroy couch, my mind does what it always does and wanders. The freshly shaved skin where my thighs meet my pelvis starts to burn from friction, that strange paradox where something soft and easily wounded still absorbs impact like it was engineered to bear the weight of strangers. I scold myself for noticing the physics of my own body instead of the moment, but the thought keeps circling. Skin is fragile until it isn’t. A delicate hinge holding the whole structure together. Bodies are strange. The pussy endure the dick: impact, stretching, opening, absorbing, then folding back into themselves as if nothing happened. People call that delicacy. I call it engineered survival.

And somewhere in that discomfort the idea arrives, sharp and uninvited. This is the story. This exact moment. I picture a poet on a rooftop in New York, half feral and half brilliant, writing about spiritual collapse through the taste of a two a.m. cigarette. I give him long tangled hair and a cardigan Kurt Cobain would have stolen. I name him Snowblow. He is neo-anomie punk adjacent grunge, post-industrial lyricism with a death wish, the bastard child of Richard Siken if Siken had been raised by gutter water and fluorescent bodega lights. People worship him for the piece he wrote last month that sounds like a prayer uttered under a bridge. I imagine him fucking someone from behind while she thinks about redecorating and Taylor Swift and why her mind refuses to stay inside her body when it matters.

The thought feels brutal and perfect in equal measure.

Bill finishes.

I pull my jeans back on.

And I know exactly what I am submitting next.

I write the whole thing in one sitting, the way people confess under strobe lights. The words come fast and feral, elbowing each other like drunks trying to reach the mic. I type until my wrists ache and the room smells like stale coffee and overclocked emotion. Snowblow takes shape on the screen with the swagger of someone who has already ruined a marriage or two. The girl becomes a shadow version of me, or maybe the version I keep hidden behind drywall and denial.

By three in the morning I am hunched in the glow of the monitor, hitting submit on The New Yorker’s portal with the manic certainty of someone launching a message in a bottle toward a yacht club. The document uploads. The confirmation email pings. The apartment hums in approval or warning. Hard to tell which.

By sunrise I know the rejection is inevitable. The New Yorker takes months when they are pretending to consider a story, but this one will get skimmed by an intern whose parents paid for their creative writing degree and dismissed before the coffee cools. It is too raw for them, too blunt, too alive. Too vulgar. Beneath their coveted level of pretentious as fuck. Which is perfect. Exactly what the nail has been waiting for.

I wash my face, put on real pants, and walk to the grocery store to buy chrysanthemums, heavy white ones that look like apology letters from God. I carry them home with both hands, careful as if they might bruise.

Downstairs the wet-bar kitchen waits in its stale loneliness. I set the flowers on the counter I have not touched in years. The air shifts a little, like the room knows a great collapse is coming and is trying to straighten its posture before it happens.

I stand there and breathe, certain the no is already on its way.