Slush

Will I ever be slush?  That sagging, loaded pile of words that have made their way into the offices of agents?  These words have been scribbled down by millions of wannabes, of hopetobes, of dreamedsincetheywere7tobes.  These piles are formed from far and wide.  From the cornfields of Iowa to the riverside towns of Saskatchewan, from the bellies of great cites to the Walden Pond cabins of Maine.  Stories, histories, oh-so-important memoirs are gouged from minds and placed onto paper.  People put their absolute hearts and their unremitting souls into these stapled and bound  masterpieces.  Their days are filled with anguish, writing these words.  Their wakeful nights are filled with tosses and turns about one sentence, one comma, one climax.  From the desks of these starved writers fly their lifetime achievements.  They fly Fed-Ex, or travel by UPS, or maybe even the snaily Postal Service.  From one hand to the next these pages are tossed... until they eventually land on another desk.  A more important desk.  And on that fine, oak desk, they sit for days, weeks, months until their corners curl up, aching to be noticed, to be read.  Lowly interns are instructed to pick them up, to peruse.  The lowly intern finds himself in a loathsome mood that day, hasn't had his coffee or his I love you or his espn.com yet and so he reads through the story quickly and pays no mind.  He isn't taken by the first few lines, he doesn't let the words carry him to the 10th, the 40th, the 190th page.  

NO.

He scrawls on the top of the cover letter.  

And those two letters, those two letters stand alone on the top of the pile of slush, and the fantastic dream of a house by the sea and a family of three and a rope swing on a big oak tree, dies.