The Starving Heart

The envelope was cream-colored, heavy, and smelled faintly of lavender — which was insulting, really, because lavender had always been Imogen Hale's favorite scent, and now she was going to hate it for the rest of her life. She stood in the kitchen of her one-bedroom apartment, the envelope torn open on the counter beside a cold cup of coffee and a half-eaten bagel. Her cat, a fat ginger named Wallace, sat on the windowsill and watched her with the indifferent judgment only cats can achieve. She had been waiting for this envelope for eleven weeks. The manuscript inside had taken her two years. The letter inside the envelope said: *Dear Ms. Hale,* *Thank you for submitting *The Last Paper Crane* to Bright Harbor Books. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that your book has not been selected for a contract.* *We suggest reading popular books on our platform, as they can provide valuable writing tips and inspiration. Alternatively, you may visit StaryWriting to further enhance your skills.* *Additionally, we are currently hosting a new writing contest called "Stary Writing Marathon." We encourage you to participate.* *With warm regards,* *The Editorial Team* Imogen read the letter three times. The first time, her brain refused to process the word *regret*. The second time, she focused on *popular books* and felt something hot and sour rise in her throat. The third time, she stopped at *StaryWriting* and let out a laugh that was not a laugh at all — more like a cough wrapped in despair. StaryWriting. The website with the grinning cartoon star. The place where aspiring authors went to learn how to write "hook-driven, trope-forward, emotionally optimized fiction." She had seen their ads on social media. *Turn your passion into a bestseller!* *Learn the 7 secrets of viral storytelling!* *Your first lesson is free!* She would rather swallow her own teeth. Wallace jumped off the windowsill and padded over to rub against her ankle. She bent down and scooped him up, burying her face in his warm, slightly dusty fur. "What am I going to do, Wally?" she whispered. Wallace purred. It was not helpful advice. --- Imogen Hale was thirty-two years old, which meant she was old enough to know better and young enough to keep making the same mistakes anyway. She had been writing since she was twelve, when she had filled a spiral notebook with a story about a girl who discovered a hidden kingdom inside her grandmother's wardrobe. That story had been terrible — full of adverbs and exclamation points and a villain who cackled — but it had made her mother cry in a good way, and Imogen had been chasing that feeling ever since. She had studied creative writing in college, where a professor told her she had "a rare gift for emotional precision" and then gave her a B-plus because her plots were "too quiet." She had worked as a freelance editor for five years, fixing other people's sentences while her own manuscripts gathered digital dust. She had written three novels before *The Last Paper Crane* — a literary drama about a dementia ward, a magical realism story about a woman who could see ghosts in mirrors, and a historical fiction about female lighthouse keepers during World War II. All three had been rejected by every publisher she submitted to. *The Last Paper Crane* was supposed to be different. It was the story of a young Japanese-American woman named Yuki who returns to her late grandmother's house in the California countryside and discovers that her grandmother had been folding a thousand paper cranes — not for luck, as the legend said, but to trap the souls of the family members she had lost in the internment camps. The cranes whispered. The house remembered. And Yuki had to decide whether to release the souls or keep them forever. Imogen had poured everything into this book. Her own grandmother's death. Her complicated feelings about inheritance and grief. The summer she had spent in rural Japan as a teenager, learning to fold paper cranes from an old woman who spoke no English. The manuscript was 112,000 words of quiet, aching beauty — or so she had believed. Now she was holding proof that the world disagreed. She set Wallace down and picked up her phone. Eleven missed messages, all from her best friend, Priya, who had been the first person to read *The Last Paper Crane* and had cried so hard she'd had to reapply her mascara twice. Imogen typed: *Got the rejection.* Three dots appeared immediately. Then: *Coming over. Bring wine? I'll bring wine.* *You're the one coming over. Why would I bring wine to my own apartment?* *Because you need to learn to delegate, honey. See you in 20.* Priya arrived in twenty-two minutes, carrying two bottles of red wine and a bag of dumplings from the place on Grand Street. She was a graphic designer with purple hair and the emotional intelligence of a licensed therapist, which was fortunate because Imogen could not afford a licensed therapist. They sat on the worn velvet couch that Imogen had inherited from her grandmother — the same grandmother who had inspired the book — and ate dumplings directly from the takeout container while Priya read the rejection letter aloud in a dramatic British accent. "'We suggest reading popular books on our platform,'" Priya intoned, holding the letter like a Shakespearean prop. "'As they can provide valuable writing tips and inspiration.' Immy, this is insulting. It's like a chef telling you to eat more microwave meals." "I know," Imogen said, staring at the ceiling. "The worst part is they're not wrong." Priya lowered the letter. "What do you mean?" "I mean — I don't read popular books. I read literary fiction. I read translated novels. I read obscure poetry collections that went out of print in 1987. I don't know what's actually selling right now." She gestured vaguely at her bookshelf, which was indeed filled with slim volumes with austere covers. "Maybe my book *is* too quiet. Maybe I need to learn how to write something that people actually want to read." "Your book is beautiful," Priya said firmly. "I cried for forty-five minutes." "That's not a business model." "It should be." They finished the dumplings and opened the first bottle of wine. Somewhere around the third glass, Priya pulled out her phone and typed something with aggressive thumbs. "What are you doing?" Imogen asked. "Looking up this StaryWriting thing." "No. Absolutely not." "Just looking, Immy. Information is power." Priya's brow furrowed. "Huh. They have this contest. The Stary Writing Marathon. Thirty days, write a 50,000-word novel, daily prompts. Winner gets a publishing contract with — oh, look at that — Bright Harbor Books." Imogen sat up so fast she nearly spilled her wine. "The same publisher that just rejected me?" "The very same." Priya turned the phone around to show her. The contest page was aggressively cheerful — bright colors, cartoon stars, testimonials from past winners with names like *AriaSparkle99* and *QuillMasterX*. "You should enter." "I should burn my laptop and move to a cabin in Vermont." "One of those things is more achievable than the other, and it's not the cabin." Priya set the phone on the coffee table between them. "Look. You've been rejected by every traditional publisher you've submitted to. That's not a judgment on your talent — it's a judgment on your packaging. The system doesn't know what to do with you. So either you keep banging your head against the same wall, or you try something different." "StaryWriting is not 'something different.' It's something humiliating." "Why? Because it's popular? Because it's successful?" Priya leaned forward, her purple hair falling across her face. "Immy, you are not too good for success. You are not too literary for readers. You are not above learning how to tell a story that makes people turn pages instead of admiring the sentences." Imogen wanted to argue. She wanted to say that *The Last Paper Crane* did make people turn pages — slowly, thoughtfully, the way you turn pages in a museum catalog. She wanted to say that art was not about optimization. She wanted to say that the cartoon star made her want to scream. But she also wanted to stop feeling like a failure. She wanted to stop checking her email every morning with a hollow hope. She wanted to write something that someone, somewhere, would read without being asked. "Thirty days," she said finally, the words tasting like medicine. "Thirty days," Priya confirmed. "50,000 words." "Less than 2,000 a day. You've written more than that on a good morning." "The prompts are probably idiotic." "Then you'll write something idiotic and brilliant, because that's what you do." Priya picked up her wine glass and raised it. "To the Stary Writing Marathon. May it be less terrible than you expect." Imogen clinked her glass against Priya's. "And may I not regret this in the morning." But she already regretted it. And she hadn't even registered yet. --- At 11:47 that night, alone in her apartment with Wallace purring on her chest, Imogen opened her laptop and typed *StaryWriting.com* into her browser. The website loaded with a cheerful chime. The cartoon star — who had been given a name, she now saw: *Stella* — winked at her and said, *"Ready to write something amazing?"* "No," Imogen said aloud. She clicked the *Register for the Marathon* button anyway. The registration form was mercifully short. Name. Email. Genre preference. She hesitated over the last one. The options were: *Romance*, *Mystery/Thriller*, *Fantasy/Sci-Fi*, *Contemporary Fiction*, and *Other*. She almost clicked *Other*, but a tiny voice in her head — which sounded exactly like her old creative writing professor — whispered, *Don't be difficult, Imogen. Don't be the girl who picks 'other.'* She clicked *Contemporary Fiction*. Then she clicked *Submit*. A confirmation email arrived within seconds. *Welcome to the Stary Writing Marathon! Your first prompt will arrive on Monday at 6:00 AM. Prepare to write like never before!* It was Thursday. She had four days to prepare. She spent them doing the opposite of preparing. She cleaned her apartment. She organized her spice rack alphabetically. She watched an entire season of a reality show about people competing to become professional cake decorators. She did not open her manuscript folder. She did not think about *The Last Paper Crane*. She did not allow herself to wonder what Yuki would think of her, sitting here, about to write something for a contest sponsored by the same people who had just rejected her. She was betraying Yuki. That was how it felt. Like she was abandoning her quiet, aching book for a chance at something loud and shiny. But on Sunday night, unable to sleep, she opened a new document and typed two words at the top: *CHAPTER ONE* Then she stared at the blinking cursor for an hour and wrote nothing. --- Monday arrived like a verdict. Imogen was awake before her alarm, which went off at 5:30. She made coffee. She fed Wallace. She sat at her desk — a small wooden thing she had bought from a garage sale for twenty dollars — and opened her laptop at 5:59. At 6:00 exactly, the email arrived. *Day One Prompt: Write a scene where two strangers meet in a place where neither of them belongs. Use all five senses. Make the reader feel the awkwardness.* Imogen read the prompt three times. Then she read it again. *A place where neither of them belongs.* She thought about all the places she had never belonged. The party in college where everyone knew the music and she didn't. The publishing conference where agents talked about "platform" and "brand" like those were words that meant something real. The creative writing workshop where her classmates wrote stories about wealthy white people having quiet crises, and she wrote about a Japanese-American girl folding paper cranes, and no one knew what to say except *"This is very... specific."* She thought about her grandmother, who had never belonged in California — who had been sent to an internment camp at seventeen, then released into a country that did not want her, then spent the rest of her life folding paper cranes in a small house that smelled of ginger and loss. Then she began to type. *The funeral home was not supposed to smell like cinnamon, but it did.* *Maya Okada had been to exactly three funerals in her life — her grandfather's, her goldfish's (which did not count, her mother said, but Maya counted it anyway), and now this one. This one was for a woman she had never met, which made it the strangest of all.* *"You must be the niece," said a voice behind her.* *Maya turned. The man standing there was young — maybe thirty — with a crooked tie and the look of someone who had been crying recently but had tried to hide it. He was holding a potted succulent in both hands like a shield.* *"I'm sorry?" Maya said.* *"The niece. Of the deceased. You look like her."* *"I never met her."* *"Then how do you know you don't look like her?"* *Maya opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "Are you always this difficult at funerals?"* *The man smiled, and it was the kind of smile that made Maya think he practiced it in the mirror to make sure it didn't reach his eyes. "Only at the ones for people I didn't know."* *He held out the succulent. "I brought this. Is that weird? I don't know the etiquette for strangers at funerals."* *"I think the etiquette is that you're not supposed to be here at all."* *"And yet," he said, looking around at the cinnamon-scented room with its plastic flowers and folding chairs, "here we both are."* Imogen wrote for three hours. She wrote about Maya, a graphic designer who had been dragged to the funeral of a great-aunt she'd never met because her mother was "too emotional to attend alone." She wrote about the man, whose name was Sam, and who turned out to be there for an even stranger reason: he had found the deceased woman's obituary in the newspaper and had come because her name was the same as his mother's, who had died five years ago, and he wanted to see what a life looked like when it ended in a different way. She wrote about the awkwardness of sharing a pew with a stranger. The too-loud organ music. The way the cinnamon smell seemed to grow stronger whenever anyone cried. The moment when Maya accidentally laughed during the eulogy — because the pastor had mispronounced the great-aunt's name three times in a row — and Sam had covered for her by pretending to cough. She wrote until her fingers ached and her coffee went cold and Wallace climbed onto the desk and sat on her keyboard. At 9:17 AM, she typed the last sentence: *"Maya looked at Sam and thought: I will never see this man again. Which was, she would later learn, the first wrong thing she had ever been sure of."* Then she submitted the chapter. The dashboard updated: *Chapter received! Average response time: 12-24 hours. Keep writing!* Imogen leaned back in her chair. Her heart was pounding. Her hands were shaking. She had just written 2,300 words about two strangers at a funeral. She had just written something that was not *The Last Paper Crane*. She had just written something that was, she realized with a start, *fun*. --- That night, the feedback arrived. It was from a judge named Ellis Vang. The note said: *"Day One — Strong start. The cinnamon detail is excellent (specific, sensory, unexpected). The dialogue crackles. However, the emotional turn in paragraph 18 feels rushed — let Maya sit in her discomfort longer before Sam makes her laugh. Also, be careful with 'which was, she would later learn' constructions. Trust your reader to infer the future significance without being told.* *Score: 82/100. Keep going."* Eighty-two out of one hundred. Not a grade she would have bragged about in college. But Ellis Vang had not dismissed her. Ellis Vang had read her words carefully and offered a suggestion that made sense. Imogen saved the note in a folder on her desktop. Then she opened the document for Day Two and stared at the blank page until midnight. She did not write another word that night. But she also did not sleep. She was thinking about Maya and Sam. About the cinnamon funeral home. About the succulent that Sam had left on the pew when he walked out, and how Maya had picked it up without thinking, and how it was now sitting on her own desk, a small green witness to something she did not yet understand. She was thinking about the Stary Writing Marathon, and how she had entered it as a joke, and how it was no longer a joke at all. She was thinking about the cartoon star, Stella, and wondering if it was possible to hate something and need something at the same time. At 2:00 AM, she opened a new document and wrote: *CHAPTER TWO* *The succulent died on Day Three, which Maya took as a sign.*