Dear Desmond,
Our editorial staff thanks you sincerely for sending “When to Panic” to Intrepid Inkblot. We consider it a privilege to review your short fiction. We admired the story’s skillful imagery, and the decision to end with your narrator, Janie, debating in her idling car, over whether to merge onto the highway entrance ramp and depart her hometown forever, or pull into her former lover’s driveway for a reconciliatory dinner.
While we are, unfortunately, passing on your piece at this time, we sincerely hope that you will consider sending more work our way during Intrepid Inkblot’s next reading window, which will occur for five hours in the dead of night, on an undisclosed date in early February.
The staff at II regret that time constraints prohibit a longer response.
When we mention “time constraints” of the staff, Desmond, what we mean is my constraints. I am, of course, the one writing you this note, but also, the only one who can. No other II staff remains at the college employing me. Further, this college has just entirely dissolved, midterm, its Geography, Modern Languages, and Sociology departments. As my college must complete the term’s orphaned offerings to maintain curricular accreditation, remaining faculty are now being expected to fill the fissures, inheriting into our workloads all courses taught by our suddenly removed colleagues. So I find myself leading a section of something called Advanced GIS and Geospatial Techniques, despite my inability to even make the GPS system in my asthmatic Kia function properly.
When I say we are passing on your piece “at this time,” this is not mere euphemism. If you had only sent it between March 2009 and May 2014! I recall those particular issues sharply, and can attest “When to Panic” would have made, then, a perfect match.
We expect another window of creative confluence to open in 1,446 days, if you care to try again. Please recall, though, we do not accept simultaneous submissions.
“When to Panic” deserves, Desmond, a good home. Don’t we all? My own home will soon undergo radical changes, as budget slashing at this college where I work and edit pieces like yours, leaves me unable to afford both my mortgage and my student loan repayments. This may be for the better. Surveying my situation through the not-so-funhouse mirror of critical distance, my home has become more home than I can handle. The point of purchasing it was to share its charms (and costs) with someone special. Not long ago, I made the hard decision to discard my someone. Much in the way that — come to think of it, Desmond — Janie discards Derek in “When to Panic”. I confess I took speculative solace in Janie’s remaking of herself in the wake of humiliation. After learning Derek concealed he had fathered a child in a prior relationship.
My Derek (not actually a Derek) had (smaller) ways of humiliating me. He never failed to bring up my salary at parties. I came off as his charity case. When it was the two of us dining at restaurants, he’d pick up our checks wordlessly, warmly. With groups, though, he’d make a show. “Put away your credit card, babe!” he’d bark. “We’re already late for the concert! A transaction decline is only gonna delay us more.” Or: “She and I have a meal pact. I pay at any place where customers are expected to wear shoes. She covers our stops at Arby’s.” While cash flush, my Derek’s credit rating was in the toilet. So when it came to the mortgage, he had no issue with putting my name on that.
Somewhat related, Desmond, let me pause to praise the midsection of “When to Panic.” When Janie took shifts at the striptease club after she and Derek split, to lift herself out of debt, the staff of II sympathized. When Derek entered the club to catch her act, we got nervous. Was he stalking her? Intending to inflict upon her further humiliation? When he laid an exorbitant cash roll at her feet, then left before her set’s music began, we, along with Janie, scratched our collective head. Until then we’d been told Derek had redeeming qualities. Only when he was humbled, lowered, did we see them emerge. We liked the flip of Janie noticing, as she disrobed during Derek’s third visit to her stage, how he was clean-shaven, dressed for an opera, in the suit she had picked out with him. Suddenly his crosstown drives to the club, the cash he sets down that he can scarcely afford to part with, take on genuine flickers of contrition. When Derek’s gaze softens as he studies Janie’s under the glare of the spotlight, we see recalibration. Regrets over what he has let go dim, and slip away.
Speaking of recalibration: Yesterday I peeled out of a salon parking lot, fuming. The salon is my favorite, now that I no longer can afford my real favorite. A new stylist had cut and rinsed me into regret. I asked for a cut that caught my essence, that transformed me. It transformed me, all right: into my mother. The stylist clipped my curtain bangs high above the brows, exposing a field of forehead frown lines. Each looked like a badly-bent window blind. I parked in my driveway slapping the steering wheel, a song on the throwback station scoring my piss and vinegar. This song…. Desmond, as a teen, I outright despised the sucker. When I heard its notes back then, I would swivel my car’s radio tuner dial madly, as if to avert a gruesome collision. But in that lot? I cranked the volume. Hating myself for singing in time to the tune’s saccharine swells, patting its turgid beat on my steering wheel. Was this reaction — do you think, Desmond — a baffling branch of nostalgia? Forming adhesive allegiance to what once repelled me, because recognizability had somehow converted into romance?
I glanced at my rear-view mirror, then swiveled it away from my face. As madly as I used to twist the radio dial. It wasn’t the failed cut maddening me anymore. It was that no matter how hard I stared at my reflection, what makeup I applied, what lighting adjustments I made, or what degree I pivoted my head (chin down, brows arched, half-profile), I couldn’t conjure a single alternative style.
The terrible throwback song I apparently, now, reveled in, faded into station call signs and promos, when my phone rang. Seeing those ten familiar digits was as startling, Desmond, I swear, as seeing my own bent bone break through skin. I didn’t pick up. I saw he’d called earlier, an hour before. This time, when the message flag materialized, the breathless rush in my throat matched when I’d sung the song. My Derek was breathless too. Rattled. Had he been crushed in a car wreck? Had I denied him the final comfort of my voice as he bled out? I listened. He was in Utah, hiking. So relieved to reunite with his vehicle, he told me he started caressing its side mirror. Trying to flag a ranger. Guzzling from a puddle, not caring how sick it would leave him later. This is what he said: “I just nearly died. The worst kind of death. Heatstroke, dehydration. Boiling blood. Don’t know what I was thinking. Moab in May, by myself? I picked an easy hike at Dead Horse, but at the last moment decided to push it to Zion. Thank God the trail was out-and-back. Thank God there were scraps of cloud cover. If not, it would’ve been curtains. Don’t know what I was thinking. No cell service. No one knowing I’d come. Don’t know what I was…. No. I know what I thought. I chose the trail I chose because you had hiked it, years ago, with a group. Remember telling me? It sounded astonishing. My mistake was thinking I could share the sensation without you. I kept almost passing out. Thinking how you rationed water better. How you would’ve insisted on packing a bigger bottle. A pack of gum to keep our mouths moist. Kept thinking of how I refused to cart apples on hikes — too much bulk in my bag — but you’d overrule me, knowing the juice and energy would make the weight worth it. How I sucked in scenery on the way up with a storm of grins. So delirious on the way down, I thought the sun somehow had melted the trailhead. Not one bend familiar. Each rock overhang a decent-enough looking last bed. I wouldn’t have been in this bind if we’d gone up together. Even if we were, I wouldn’t have feared it. I called so we could be together again. Voice to voice, just for a moment. In case I didn’t make it back down.”
Recapping my Derek’s message, Desmond, does not do it full justice. You’re not hearing the gasps and pants. The troubling coughs churning out of his chest. When he’d make emotional outbursts like that, back when we were one, I found it pathetic. This time, I didn’t hit delete. I hit replay. If I’m being honest, Desmond, I kept cranking the volume.
I didn’t text my Derek back until much later. I knew he’d have notifications off. I suggested he stop by our old place this Saturday. With dinner. Told him we could compare notes, on where we might have misplaced the maps of our lives.
I do not for one instant call this a call to rekindle our spark. Love, here, may not even be my goal. It simply, finally, could come down to a case of being unable or unwilling to drum up the destructive drive to self-harm or medicate, but still seeking something — someone, anyone — that will allow me to enjoy brief vacations from anxiety.
There, dear Desmond, I of course channeled your Derek. The long, disturbed, and finally baffled voicemail he left Janie, when he invited her for dinner: “Why the fuck can’t I breathe in this world anymore? Did I reach a point where it takes a second set of lungs to muster the oxygen?” Channeled Janie in your ending, parked beyond Derek’s periphery. How she can’t decide whether delight or fear made her heart race when he pulls in his driveway, and pulls out takeout. Can’t quite read whether his smile beams out courage or smugness. But she knows she sees in it wintry remnants of the prideful hunter-gatherer, stirred from DNA’s depths, returning home at dusk with provisions for his mate, cellophane bags and clamshell containers brimming over with roast beef and curly fries.
Desmond, allow me to end this lengthy rejection letter with a hairpin turn. Intrepid Inkblot would be delighted to accept “When to Panic”. It is a gripping narrative, prescient about this time in which we find ourselves, this tide of sighs battering us daily. I look forward to fine-tuning it for publication, assuming my department is not, in the interim, dissolved. Please fill out this enclosed form, so that I may process your honorarium — a $3 coupon, redeemable towards any combo meal at Arby’s — in a timely fashion.
With thanks for your wise words,
The II Team
Image by iam_os on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- When to Panic - July 3, 2026