Going Flaming Bagel

What do a feline vanishing act, a carbonized breakfast, and submissions to literary magazines have in common?

A few years ago my husband Pat and I lost our cat. In a hotel room. She was in the bed with us when we went to sleep but gone when we woke up the next morning. By the time we’d searched our room a second time, I was certain she’d somehow escaped. Which meant she was dead. She was smushed under a car tire in the parking lot or her throat had been torn out by a rabid dog behind the hotel dumpster. I began to yank at my fingers, tremble, and gasp for breath. No, no, my husband insisted, impossible. She has to be in this room.

While Pat did another slow search, the solution to our problem came to me. Fine, Pat could be useless and bewildered—I would act! I raced to the bed and gathered the bedspread in my arms, then ran to the bathroom, where I stuffed it into the tub. See, it was clear she wasn’t in the bathroom. Back for the suitcase, which I threw onto the bedspread. But to be absolutely sure she wasn’t somewhere in that hotel room I had to empty the room of everything. Of course, right? While I raced back and forth from the bathroom, toting our shoes, the kitty carrier, the luggage stand, pillows… useless and bewildered Pat found the cat. I had just yanked a table lamp’s plug from the wall socket when he broke through my panic with a shout of victory.

Our very chunky cat had somehow managed to squeeze herself between the bed’s metal headboard and the wall. I swear, you’d think you couldn’t get a Frisbee in that space. But cats have fancy joints and very strong wills. Pat discovered flounder-kitty when he decided the bed was the only thing in the room that could possibly shelter her and pulled it out from the wall. So I was right about one thing—something did have to be moved….

After joyful weeping, feeding kitty, emptying the bathroom, and sleeping off the post-adrenaline exhaustion, I apologized to my husband for going flaming bagel.

***

The flaming bagel incident was the first time I noticed that I don’t function well in stressful situations. I’ll dispense with the reference by asking a question: If you find yourself holding a flaming bagel in your oven-mittened hand, what do you do? Do you turn to the sink behind you and dump it, then run water on it? Or do you stare at it, transfixed, thinking only that you mustn’t let a burning bagel cause the fire alarm to go off, and as you watch the flames go out and thick smoke stream from your ruined breakfast, do you, I don’t know, since the kitchen sink appears to be off-limits, open a window? Or! Do you run from your kitchen, waving the flaming-now-smoking bagel over your head, leaping down the hall to catch more air? You know, because if you wave it around and jump as high as you can, the smoke will just vanish? Right, so no piercing fire alarm, no fire truck, no curious neighbors. I think we know what you would do. And now you know what I did.

***

Last spring I sent out my first batch of submissions. I did all the things you’re supposed to do to target markets: I bought the fat guide books, I stayed at the library until lights out, I read archived short stories on the web until my head throbbed. When I was ready to hit the post office I created a lovely table in Word to track my submissions. Oh, that table. I spent hours on it. “I’ve got columns all across the page with the important information recorded for every piece” I told one former teacher. “And it’s color-coded!” I leaned in. “I don’t even have to say that a magazine turned me down—I just change the color.” Oh, yeah, he said, there’s no doubt. You’re a writer.

Everyone says to keep the submissions going out the door so the rejection slips don’t hurt quite so much. Sure, eight magazines have said no, but I’ve still got four copies out there and a few more to send out this week. Keep hope alive! I set up a monthly schedule and forced myself to stick with it for three months, wondering why I found the process so painful, so tiring. That three months brought me to summer, when it’s difficult to find open markets. I sent out a few pieces and then waited out the months until September. When I sent nothing. And then October, when I also sent nothing. I kept getting the rejection slips but I wasn’t replacing them with more hope. Why?

I finally pushed through my block and sent one story out in December. Progress! Then a handful in January. I was relieved and proud but exhausted. Just mailing out three stories had wiped me out.

A few days later I willed myself to make a few electronic submissions. As I was moving through the process something made me stop and focus on myself. I was breathing heavy and my heart was racing. Why was I sweating in January? Why on earth was I shaking? I hit “continue,” viewed my submission entry, and went to the next website. As I made changes to my file according to the magazine’s guidelines, I caught myself thinking, “Why do they have to make it so hard?” and “Why can’t they all get together and agree on one damn format?” and “What do they care if I double-space or not?” Then I thought, “Why are they making me do this?”

So let’s review: Racing heartbeat, sweating, shaking, agitated thoughts that do not accurately reflect the situation. I was at my desk, outwardly a calm woman submitting stories to magazines. Inside I was going flaming bagel.

Panic is exhausting. Even when it’s short-lived and the situation that felt so dire morphs within minutes into a funny anecdote for your friends. Before you tell that story you’re going to have to sleep off the fear. And panic is, of course, really unpleasant. Who wants to shake and gasp for breath? I don’t. Which, I suppose, is why I had such a hard time making myself send out those submissions.

***

I like to believe that what I think of as my animal brain—the one that drenches me in that awful chemical soup whenever I am stressed-crazy—has a sense of humor. If I ever find myself in the midst of a genuine emergency, I’m counting on animal brain to recognize the gravity of the situation and direct my adrenaline to the right physical response. In the meantime animal brain just likes to laugh. So when faced with a non-emergency like a flaming bagel that couldn’t possibly cause a fire, or a thoughtless, hiding cat blessed with one functional adult hot on her trail, my animal brain says, hey, I know, let’s make her do a few tricks. When faced with the non-emergency of making an electronic submission, my animal brain recently made me miss-type the title of my story “Forever Hold Your Peace” as “Forever Hold Your Piece.” Not the sort of image I was going for. (Did you know that once you hit “continue” in an online submission manager, you can never go back and change your title?) Well, we all like to laugh, right?

I can’t predict the next act of trickery from my scheming cat—generally she contents herself with jabbing exposed skin in the middle of the night, stealing pens, insisting that she hasn’t been fed. One day she might play another joke that will make me fear for her safety. When she does, animal brain might make me hose down my floors or take all my doors off their hinges. I can’t know when the flaming bagels are coming at me. But I can plan for the non-emergency-emergency of a magazine submission.

And maybe I’m not alone—okay, yes, I’m sure I’m the only person in the world who has played Baryshnikov in a hallway while clutching a flaming-now-smoking bagel, and I doubt anyone else has shifted the contents of her hotel room into the adjoining bathroom—but I’m guessing I’m not the only writer who resists making submissions and wonders why. If that describes you, tune in next time you’re preparing a submission—maybe you’ve been going a little flaming bagel and you didn’t even know it.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: No children will go hungry if you forget to put your name on every page. No bombs will go off if you do not put the word count in your cover letter. No one loses a finger if your submission gets discarded because you forgot to include a SASE. In fact—listen up, now—nothing bad happens as a result of a submission, whether or not you follow the directions. Nothing bad happens.