Rejection: Fiction

by Tony Tulathimutte

Her anger cremates away all her affection for him, but not the obsession, leaving her a scorched skeleton of wrath.

It is a cairn of shames, towered and teetering on his chest, that the slightest movement will lethally topple:

Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can’t own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition, one that Julian has somehow either mastered or never experienced,

we don’t even have a quorum for stereotypes.

On the contrary, it’s about structuring the dialogue to hear everyone out equally while minimizing harm.” This, with the kid gloves of gentility white libs always use when they want to make your annoyance feel unreasonable; the flopsweating jargon invoked to signal their literacy on the subject of your existence; that fart-holding wince when they sense their good intentions going unrewarded.

Back then I’d thought social justice drama was a college phenomenon, but here I learned everyone was doing it, politicizing in bad faith what were obviously just bad manners.