The woman sat staring into the milky swirls of her latte, hands folded in her lap. In the epicenter of the creamy cyclone in her cup, she felt a beginning, an inkling, a seed. Her memories and thoughts swarmed about the motionless center, organizing themselves into the curved arms of a story, and she envisioned how her last book had come to success. How the last seed had become a nation.
It began with the seed, the genetic offspring of a thousand works before it, waiting in a dry western soil. Then the rains came – the life occurrences and experiences – that flooded water onto the plains of her thoughts and allowed the seed to germinate. The seed reached deeper into the damp red earth, pulling ancient and established prose into its being, and it reached higher, stretching toward the unobstructed light of new possibility. Deeper it grew and higher it stretched, until the thousand green arms of its sentences fluttered in the open air for all to see.
Except it was not done growing yet. New limbs branched off of old ones, old branches died and fell away, and editorial/evolutionary concessions redistributed resources to the parts of the plant that needed them most. Upon reaching full maturity, the tumbleweed then freed itself of its author. It dried up and waited for a strong wind.
The work of art did not wait long before a powerful and unlikely gust rushed down from the north, exclamations of praise in the New York Times sweeping up the story and sending it hurtling southward. With it, numberless other stories skipped along, getting caught up on fence lines of indifference, distaste, or obscurity. But the woman’s book rolled on, a thousand seeds falling on fertile minds as it passed from reader to reader, driven by the weather phenomenon of social attention.
Hard work had won the woman’s book the validation it deserved. Hard work and a lot of luck. She brushed her obsidian hair back behind her ear and lifted the latte to her mouth. She had been lucky. Lucky that her seed had fallen on good soil, lucky that a prominent editor had crossed paths with the wandering book, lucky that her work trundled into the social scene at the right time, and lucky that it hadn’t gotten caught up with the overwhelming body of fictional work being produced and lost in a pile of weeds.
Of course, she thought while returning her rectangular reading glasses to her face, it takes hard work to be lucky.
She put down her latte, picked up a pencil, and began scribbling the next seed on her receipt.
(Fiction by Alex Pappalardo)
El Portal Literary Journal 