Rejected by McSweeney's

On a whim I submitted a goofy piece to McSweeney's Reviews of New Food. They didn't like it enough, so I'm publishing it here. It's not like I could turn it around and send it out to the Gettysburg Review, now, is it? Anyway, as Rebecca Skloot said the other day at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers' Conference, if you're a freelance writer, you need a blog. So here's my blog.

I live in Roland Park, in Baltimore, which is a real neighborhood, and it's where some of Anne Tyler's characters live. (I should have known -- of course she doesn't have a website so it was pointless to try to turn her name into a hyperlink. But Googling her led me to a lot of cool links, including failbetter.com, which boasts an actual interview with her and I got so distracted that I nearly didn't finish this post.)

Oh, right, the food thing:

My mistress is annoyed.

Last evening when no one was looking she ate a whole tub of Fresh! Hot Salsa with a crowd-pleaser bag of salty chips, then devoured a large chocolate bar with hazelnuts. (She did not give me any of it.) This made her drink a lot of water. She couldn’t sleep, I suppose because of the chocolate and the water, so she got up, went to the bathroom, took ibuprofen and acetaminophen together, and drank another large quantity of water. Then she slept until 10:30 and woke up groggy, downed four cups of black coffee, and sat here at this screen staring, apparently unable to work. She kept pressing on her belly with her arms folded. She went into the bathroom several times, fiddling with something or other. Around two, she got dressed but found she could not force her feet into any of her favorite shoes, so she settled for a pair of pink and green flip-flops that had lots of pretty buttons and exotic silk flowers sewn on them, and the bottoms were hand painted with little paisleys and polka dots. When she came back, this screen had gone black and in the reflection, she saw something that bothered her in the middle of her cheek and began picking at it. She moaned, and went back to the kitchen to make more coffee.

I wiggled the mouse with my nose and saw the word Fresh! on the screen in an email addressed to McSweeney’s but there was nothing written after it.

The flip-flops were under her chair. My gums were itching.