Not So Freelance
{shouting into the void}

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© 2006 R.C. Barajas

ain spatters the windscreen, giving everything a pixilated look – as though Photoshop has run amok through the world outside my car.

In my head I’m going over, yet again, a phone conversation from four weeks ago while my kids practice on the soccer field, their running forms indistinct through the ripple of water on the glass.

            I like it, the editor had said, and the two of you had a spirited talk about the topic almost as equals, and like colleagues, she told you she’d given the proposal the thumbs up – all she needed was the official green light from her fellow editors. Proposal meetings were on Mondays, only four days away. She’d call you. This will be for the August issue so start taking notes, she said. People will really relate to this, she said.

Then followed a month of gaping, wretched, poisonous silence, which slowly filled – like the tank of an old toilet - with your rising insecurities. Your mind rolled film on what must have happened:

Around a long table stained with hundreds of concentric coffee rings sits the casually au currant group gazing coolly at your editor. “What were you thinking?” they smirk. The hippest, youngest one cocks his shaved head and grins, “What’d you smoke for lunch, eh?” An artsy, confident woman with dreads sheaths her pen with an irritable click. “Her? Again? Come on, haven’t we thrown her enough bones?” And your editor laughs in a self-deprecating sort of way, shakes her head and apologizes for wasting their time – it had been a long week, she laughs – and says she’ll extricate herself somehow – after all no promises were made. Later she’ll slouch back to her desk, knowing she’ll never make the phone call. Just let it die a natural death; just let the writer stop sending her these inane pitches! Yes, she breathes, silence is best in this case. Then she’ll shrug her jacket onto the back of her chair, get out her blue pen and carefully peel the lid off her skim half-caff latte so as not to spatter the piece on her desk, the one submitted by an actual writer, the cover story for an issue next month… ah, real writing!

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