Alma

Comes now the story of Alma.

Alma was a young writer who had yet to be published. She felt moved by the literary greats: voices that echoed in her mind that she was one of them.

Alma went to school and got an education and wrote every day. She worked a full time job and would write novels and short stories on the side. No matter what she wrote and no matter how good the quality she felt it had, everything she submitted was rejected. Publishers, agents, literary journals, magazines: the outlet didn’t matter. But Alma did not quit.

One day the moon, seeing her dejected though determined, decided to help her. As she looked up in the night sky the moon told her that no one wanted to read her writing and that she was wasting her time.

Alma cried at the pronouncement. As time went on, she wondered if the moon was right and that she should stop. But Alma could not quit. She wrote on.

Alma worked and wrote. She made no time for a marriage or a family. She was dedicated.

Alma wrote short stories. Alma wrote articles. Alma wrote book reviews. Alma started blogs. Alma wrote novels and begged agents and publishers to read them.

But it did not matter. All were rejected. They were never going to let her in.

She wrote on, however. Deciding that she no longer cared for publication, she wrote for herself and continued to reach out to audiences. All she wanted, she thought, was an audience, a community of readership. Alma wrote for a blog she created and filled it with fiction for the world to see.

Alma tried to focus just on her craft and the quality of her story, but she could not ignore that there was no traffic to the blog. No one was reading her work. She wrote on though.

One day Alma woke up and she was 70. She looked through all of the content she had produced and compiled: short stories, novels, essays, poems and one play. If printed on paper, the mass of it would have equaled the scale of a mountain. It was probably the largest collection of stories that no one ever read and no one cared about.

Alma wanted to write on but decided that the moon was right. She had wasted so much time and no one cared what she had to say. Surrounded in an empty home full of her unwanted creations, Alma decided that it had been too much and yet not enough.

Alma poured kerosene over her papers, her laptop and her home. She lit a match and tossed it upon the waste.