I don’t recall where this story came from. It may have been a mood which materialised and which I found myself hoping to condense into words – or it may have arisen from some more abstract ambition to tell a very short story, one of those “but can you?” sorts of writers’ challenges – or it might have been an image around which a story wanted to be built. My decaying memory is not providing an answer, but I think maybe it was the first. We all lose: things, people, opportunities, memories, powers of memory, other lives we might have lived. I think I wanted to see whether it were possible to distil a mood into as few words as I could. Brevity is a lovely challenge. Think of how many songs have broken your heart with a hundred words or fewer.
After this piece was rejected by maybe 15–20 journals, I gave up on it. It is merely 143 words long. It is nothing and probably amounts to nothing. So whispered my conscience, and in most cases she is right – but, like all honest deities, sometimes wrong. Some months passed, and I realised I wasn’t satisfied to give up on the inconsequential thing. So I started sending it to journals again.
I think JMWW publishes a lot of good work. I’m very pleased they saw something in the piece. It is on their website here, if the mood rises.