one time the toaster told me to forgive my mother so now i only eat cold bread

I sent the essay at 2:43 a.m., the hour that makes everything sound like a vow. The air pressed against my skin with that humid, indifferent weight that makes you feel examined. The apartment held its darkness except for the screen’s light and the toaster’s small orange eye. It had started to buzz at odd intervals these last few nights. Each time it did, I stilled and fixed my gaze on the screen, as though ignoring the sound might erase it.

The file looked proper. Twelve-point Garamond. Single-spaced. One inch of white on every side, measured to the pixel. I called it a personal meditation on grief and narrative ethics, though I already knew what I had made. A suicide note in good shoes. A procession of observations arranged to seem calm, as if order alone could persuade. I told myself this was craft. I told myself discipline could act like a spell when feelings slipped their leash. The trick worked until it didn’t.

I addressed it to Francis van der Licht as if she had asked for it and I had arrived on time. In my mind her hair was always pulled into a severe knot, tighter each time I pictured it, her eyes the flat shine of steel buttons. I imagined her stirring an espresso with the handle of a tiny spoon, stirring it again and again until the surface steadied, then reading the opening paragraph with a mouth too careful to betray anything. The cover letter stayed obedient. Thank you for the opportunity. I hope this finds you well. I’ve admired your work for years. I hope to contribute to your pages. I didn’t sign it sincerely. I didn’t sign it at all. A note without a signature holds itself straighter than one that trembles at the bottom.

The toaster vibrated the second the message left my outbox. I checked the slot. Cold walls. No bread. The metal shivered like something inside had exhaled. I kept my hand there until the hum thinned, then lifted my fingers slowly, as if pulling them from skin that might hold on.

Lucian would have told me to unplug it, his voice dry, already impatient with my need to treat objects like prophets. He used to say I couldn’t tell the difference between omen and noise. I hear him even now, almost amused, penciling in the margin with his steady hand, you’re mistaking ritual for reason again.

I sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor and waited for the room to answer. Death stayed away. God’s line was busy, maybe with someone cleaner. The lights held. I didn’t cry because the body wants tasks and mine found one. I opened my email to make sure the send had really happened, that it wasn’t some flicker in my head. The message was gone. No auto-reply, only silence. The waiting began then, though I had already rehearsed it for weeks, refreshing a blank screen as if practice could prepare me.

The corkboard by the fridge held its usual committee of witnesses, a flyer for a cat I’d never seen with edges curling soft as skin left too long in water, my expired library card with a photo that no longer resembled the face I woke up with, my mother’s square handwriting on a note saying she’d had a nice time and that I should clean my bathtub, and above them all the refusal from three years ago, the white paper leaning toward yellow as if age itself had signed it, dear contributor, thank you for your submission, unfortunately we cannot offer space at this time, the words pressed so flat they seemed more printed than ever, and when I touched the corner and felt the oil of old fingerprints I pulled back quickly, as though the paper had caught me trespassing.

I told myself Francis would never write something that dull. Her rejection would taste like blood in the mouth. I told myself she would put her hand straight through me and leave it there.

I reopened the essay and watched the first sentence turn into a row of decorative tiles. I copied it into a new document and tried five new openings. Each one collapsed under its own weight. I deleted everything and pasted the original draft into the new window to see if a fresh frame could change a face. The screen gave me back the same lines, unblinking. I read the whole piece again with the same fucked-up hunger I use when I dig my nails into skin until it breaks just to make sure I’m still here.

The apartment swelled with a quiet so thick it pressed until my head rang. I typed into the margins because if my hands stopped the flood would come. not convincing. are you sad or just dressing the corpse in pretty words. Then, liar. you didn’t cry in february, you couldn’t even manage that. Then, tone shift here. almost hopeful. disgusting. delete it.

The tea I left sitting grew a scab across the top, and when I dumped it the skin tore and slid down the drain. The steam hit my face and I dragged it into my throat until it scraped. The toaster snapped loud enough to rattle the counter. I slammed the laptop shut on my fingers, left them pinched a moment too long, then yanked it open again before the lid had settled. I named the page Draft 2. My hands went at the keys until they burned, until the spacebar was wet under my thumb.

The first slice appeared at dawn. I hadn’t placed it there. The smell pulled me from sleep, a warning that lingered in the throat. The bread had burned nearly to cinder. Across the center, a single word seared in crooked lines.

wait

I held it by the edges and the ash smeared into my skin, black under my nails, bitter on my tongue when I licked without thinking. The word glowed darker than the crust, burned in like it wanted to stay. I pinned it to the corkboard beneath the lost cat, beside the expired library card, above my mother’s neat demand to scrub the bathtub, the board swallowing it like it had been waiting to eat.

The board looked satisfied then, like it had been waiting for an addition.

I opened a new document and called it Draft 2. The first line wouldn’t come. I tried it once, then again, then again, five times in all, each attempt shrinking until the words looked like they were hiding from me. I erased the whole thing and dropped the original essay back in. The cursor blinked at me like it knew it had won.

I began leaving comments along the margins until the right side of the screen filled with accusations.

false tone. hiding again.

you repeated the phrase for rhythm, not for truth.

erase this detail. no witness remembers it.

too careful. give it damage.

I watched the margin grow heavier than the text itself.

The toaster buzzed again. This time there was no bread. Smoke lifted in thin threads and dispersed across the kitchen light.

Lucian would have cut the scene there, I thought, impatient with the way I circled the same gesture. move it forward, he would scrawl. give consequence, not rehearsal. His absence pressed harder in the hum than in silence.

I opened another file, Draft 3. It began with the hairbrush. I dropped a footnote that said it echoed the apology in the second paragraph. I circled it until the paper bruised, until the ink bled through. I told myself Francis had written it, her hand pressing hard enough to tear.

In my head she answered at once. deeply affecting. I underlined until the page tore. I rehearsed replies out loud in the shower, in the store aisle, with crumbs stuck to my shirt at three in the afternoon. My mouth kept moving but the keys stayed blank.

The slice on the corkboard stiffened as the days passed, the word blurring at the edges, softening but never gone.

I kept writing. Draft 4 erased the narrator’s name. Draft 5 ended her by the second paragraph. Draft 6 removed grief entirely and left only a bored voice, pacing the walls. I imagined Francis frowning at the experiment. The thought pleased me.

In Draft 7 I cut my mother. I shoved in a footnote that said we owe no one our tenderness simply because they once called us sweet when we were quiet. The words slashed across the screen, bright and mean, and I stared at them until my eyes blurred, until the letters shook and I couldn’t tell if I had struck truth or just carved myself open for nothing.

I created a folder called final. Nine files inside, lined like coffins. The tenth file I left untitled, so the computer called it untitled 10. It had only a single sentence. there is no such thing as a quiet ending. only a polite one.

The toaster began to hum each morning at 7:14. Empty slot. No heat. The vibration ran through the floor like it wanted inside me. I yanked the plug. The hum kept going and I laughed into the noise because nothing in the room would shut up.

I didn’t tell anyone. The silence clung. Lucian hadn’t sent a word since the last time. That time it was only okay. I kept rereading it like a coal I refused to drop, the heat gone but the sting still in my hand.

The postcard came two days after the humming grew constant. It sat in the mailbox without a stamp, without a return address, my name written in block letters sharp enough to look like a correction. I carried it upstairs without breathing, my hand sweating against the paper. The message covered a single line. you haven’t finished it yet.

I flipped it over. Blank. The cardstock was too stiff, too clean. I pressed it to the corkboard and forced the pin through, under the lost cat, the hole widening like the board and the world had already been pierced in the same place before.

I stared at the words until my eyes burned and watered, the bread curling tighter at the edges, the word wait seared in but softening, refusing to die. Above it the rejection slip sagged like wet paper, the ink rotting to gray. The corkboard kept swallowing piece after piece until it looked less like a wall and more like a morgue that no longer needed me present.

That night my phone vibrated on the counter. The number wasn't familiar, but I opened the text. this isn’t what i meant by narrative arc.

I kept staring until the words blurred and sharpened again, daring me to move first. I hit reply, typed nothing, erased nothing. I tried to block the number and the phone told me there was no one to block. I turned it face down and let it glow against the counter until it dimmed on its own.

I circled the bed like it might bite, then dropped onto the couch where I could watch the door, the toaster, the corkboard that kept piling up like a shrine. I read the same three sentences again and again, muttering them until the words shredded into noise. I must have slipped under, because when I opened my eyes the toaster was on the coffee table, the cord trailing across the rug, thick and heavy like something that had crawled there on its own.

I began hiding drafts. I shoved a folder beneath the sink into a shoebox already stained from leaking pipes. I pushed pages behind novels on the shelves until the spines pressed into them like ribs grinding bone. I slid sheets beneath the couch cushions until they crackled under my weight like insects dying. I taped one to the inside of the cabinet door where the paint flaked away in sharp chips that caught under my nails. The hiding gave me a twisted relief, as if the pages needed their own lungs to breathe apart from mine.

***

If you are reading this, I assume the body has already done its work. I do not mean the body as spectacle. I mean the body as a letter folded in thirds and slipped under your door.

[too pretty. gut it or leave it. francis craves clean cuts, not theater.]

The word grief appears too often in essays. It leans on itself like a drunk against a fence. I use it here anyway because it saves me from inventing a neologism. My grief has always dressed formally, even for breakfast.

[cliché. why breakfast. are you trying to make it domestic. slice it out before it rots.]

I want this document to serve less as explanation than as arrangement. Imagine the paragraphs as furniture pulled into place before guests arrive. No matter what I tell you, the chairs will scrape the floor.

[pompous. swollen. but the scrape sounds like teeth. keep that.]

When I was seven, I learned to hold my breath under bathwater for forty seconds. The trick was not to resist the ache but to welcome it. To say, this is my clock now. I think of that every time I sit at a desk. I think of it now.

[too confessional. or maybe that’s the only part alive. lucian would spit if he saw this.]

Please do not assume this is about my mother, although I kept her note taped to the fridge longer than any calendar. Please do not assume this is about Lucian either, although I can still hear him saying silence does more harm than absence.

[this line betrays you. delete or bleed it darker. francis will smell it anyway.]

I am not leaving an inheritance of confession. I am leaving an archive of drafts. I want you to see the revisions more than the life.

[circle. circle again. this is the only honest sentence. tattoo it on the lid.]

Do not waste energy on interpretation. There is no cipher here, no grand code. There is only the page and the hand that pressed into it until the pen tore a hole.

[liar. the whole thing is cipher. scratch through until the page screams.]

If the editors of The New Yorker are holding this, I thank you for your attention. I am certain you have rejected better essays than mine. I trust you will decide quickly.

[pathetic. beg harder. francis will laugh while she deletes.]

If this finds no one, then it will remain the same as all writing ever has been: an unanswered letter.

[this is the real ending. but endings rot. note that.]

Sincerely,

Verity Cassadine

[don’t sign. names are cheap. slit the page instead.]

Steam rolled off me when I stepped out of the shower. The mirror wasn’t empty. A yellow post-it clung to the glass, edges sagging in the heat. The handwriting wasn’t mine. The words leaned forward, sharp enough to strike. burying your ending. revise. I touched the paper and the damp bled into my fingertip.

I breathed against the mirror and watched the fog spread until it swallowed the note. I dragged my hand across the glass, left streaks of water, but the post-it stayed. My fingers shook when I tore it free. The glue clung, tacky, stubborn, holding on long after the paper hit the trash.

That evening I dreamed Francis had crawled into the document. The margins filled with her handwriting, blacker than the lines I had laid down. Circles closed around whole paragraphs until they looked strangled. Red cuts slashed through the page, wide enough I thought I heard the paper cry out. When I woke, the markings clung longer than the sentences ever had.

I opened Draft 8 and typed Lucian’s name, staring as the letters dulled into symbols. I deleted them, replaced them with someone. I deleted again and wrote the ghost of someone. None of it satisfied. I highlighted the line and held the key until the screen went blank.

The toaster buzzed in the kitchen. I opened the fridge. The romaine had collapsed into brown water and a single egg rolled to the back corner, unchanged.

The silence bent inward until it pressed against me. The hours stretched thin and tore. I thought about Francis already inside the apartment, her eyes crawling over the walls, her voice sharpening the rejection until it was ready to land. I whispered thank you like it had already been spoken.

A memory split through.

Lucian and I sat cross-legged on the carpet years earlier, watching a film on his laptop. A woman moved through the story and then disappeared. The scene of her death never came. The body never appeared. The camera refused to follow, leaving only absence. I said it was dishonest, that audiences deserved to see the end. Lucian argued it was braver to withhold, that silence could devastate louder than spectacle. His face glowed in the blue of the screen. I wanted to disagree, but the thought of her vanishing without witness stayed with me long after the credits.

Now, every time a draft stopped mid-line, I remembered her. The ghost of a woman outside the frame, unfinished, both alive and already dead.

The knock came at the window. A hollow sound against glass. Not the door. The window. I live on the third floor.

When I looked, Lucian stood on the fire escape with his arms folded, his coat hanging loose on his frame. Through the glass, his eyes moved over the room as if reading me before he stepped inside.

I unlatched the window and stepped back. He climbed in, his shoes scraping the sill. Cold air followed him, edged with oil from the asphalt and the sour tang of damp metal. He stayed quiet, his gaze moving across the room before it settled on me.

The corkboard held his attention, the warped toast curling at the edges beside the rejection slip and my mother’s note that looked bruised from too many folds. The toaster loomed on the counter, proud and ridiculous, a sentinel watching. Under the sink, the shoebox pressed against its crooked lid as though swollen with secrets. He crouched and let his fingers hover, the gesture slow, almost indecent in its patience.

Finally, he turned to me. “Why did I get a copy of your suicide note in the mail?” His voice stayed patient, like someone testing for fever.

“I didn’t send you anything.”

“It was printed. Your name at the top. In your handwriting it said this isn’t for you.”

I tilted my head, hoping the shift might call the memory back. The words hovered but refused to settle. “I don’t remember writing that.”

Lucian reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded page. The paper felt raw against my fingers, cheap and overhandled, a printout from version six, the draft where the narrator never got out of bed.

“Do you think it’s good?” I only heard the vulnerability as the words left my throat.

He blinked, disbelieving. “That’s not what I came here to ask.”

His eyes moved to the toaster. Then back to me. “What are you doing, Verity?”

I lowered myself to the floor, the laminate pressing its cold straight through my skin until the silence answered for me.

Lucian stayed above me, reaching for the cabinet over the sink. The hinges groaned as he pulled down a mug, a folded note waiting inside. He set it on the counter, then another, then another, lining them up in a row that rattled faintly with each touch of ceramic.

He chose one and opened it, lips shaping the words without giving them breath. When he finished, he smoothed the fold with his thumb and placed it back among the others, the silence turning heavier around us.

“These are all apologies?” His voice was hushed, as if the papers might hear him.

“Yes.”

He didn’t laugh. He didn’t frown either. He folded another paper, slower this time, and set it aside. The silence thickened until it felt like a third body in the room.

“You need to leave this place,” he said finally. “It’s doing something to you.”

I almost told him the toaster had started it. That the apartment was only the stage. My tongue pressed against my molars with the weight of it. That would sound unhinged. Instead I said, “It isn’t the apartment.”

Lucian crossed to the fridge and pulled the door open. Cold light washed over his face as he froze. The shelves were stacked with toast, slice on slice, piled like manuscripts. No plastic, no plate, no cover. Each bore a word seared into its face.

He whispered, almost to himself, “You’ve been living with this.”

The smell of scorched crumbs drifted forward. I closed my eyes. The words came back to me, wait and again, fragments adrift without context, commands with no clear source.

Lucian shut the fridge, leaning his forehead against the door for a moment before straightening. “I can’t stay.”

“You already left.”

The sentence hit and stayed. His jaw twitched like he might spit something back, then he let the quiet have me instead.

He crossed to the desk. Version six lay there, my bed-bound draft, its folds rough under his palm. He uncapped a pen, dragged it under one line, pressing so hard the ink bled into the fibers. He slid the pen into his jacket without glancing up, opened the door, and slipped out. The latch clicked soft, too soft for the hole he left.

I stood where he had left me until my legs trembled. When I reached the desk, the paper shivered under my hand, the underlined words swollen and wet where he had pressed too deep.

some of us rehearse the ending not because we want to die but because we’re afraid we won’t.

The words throbbed like a wound.

The toaster buzzed.

I plugged it back in.

The slot shivered. An envelope slid through, its edges curled as if singed. The seal sagged under my thumb and I ripped it open and pulled a single sheet free.

you have one more version left. the one where you ask for something. start there.

The handwriting wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t Lucian’s either. The letters looked firm, the kind made by someone used to giving orders.

I pulled every draft I could reach from the shoebox, the shelves, the couch cushions, even the cabinet door with its chipped paint curling around old tape. Pages spread across the table, then the counter, then the floor. When I ran out of space, I pinned them to the walls. Paragraphs looked back at me like portraits, some scarred with red ink, some crowded with margin notes, some bare except for a single line.

By the end, the room was nothing but pages, every surface waiting for me to read it.

I turned on every light in the apartment, refusing the shadows their chance to interfere.

The drafts surrounded me, their voices stacking until my throat ached from reading them all aloud. Words smeared together in loops that tasted like rust. The sound of my own voice turned rancid in my ears. Pen in hand, I pressed until the tip dug.

This time I wrote by hand. I found a notebook I had been saving, black cover, faint blue lines. I wrote the date at the top of the page. Beneath it I began.

what happens if i live and no one notices.

The pen cut the line open, my hand trembling as I forced the stroke straight. Each phrase came slower. Paragraphs slid into place like pills on a tongue, and every word carried the charge of a pin ready to pierce.

On page six I struck out an entire section about a night in November. I wrote a footnote beneath the deletion. this memory flatters you. leave it out if you want honesty.

The toaster trembled on the floor, its cord slack but alive. I wrote until ten pages lay finished, stopping only when my breath broke uneven.

The printer gave them back in a neat stack. I slipped the pages into a manila envelope and wrote Francis’s name across the front.

I put on my shoes, opened the door, and left the apartment behind.

The hallway light flickered overhead, shadows sliding across the wall. A neighbor’s door hung ajar, a jazz record drifting out, trumpet clearing its throat between phrases. I kept walking.

I went down the stairs and out into the night, keeping my gaze low until the mailbox came into view.

I pictured Francis at her desk, eyes narrowing over the first sentence, her mouth bending toward boredom or a smile, her fingers pausing above the accept button, the delete key, the rim of a coffee cup she didn’t want but drank anyway.

I thought about what would happen if she never read it. I thought about what would happen if she did and nothing changed.

I put it in the mailbox anyway.

The corner store leaked light across the pavement, harsh and buzzing. The church kept its doors locked, glass peeling over the notices. At the train stop, a man smoked without raising his head. Rain still slicked the sidewalk, and my laces dragged until I caught one under my shoe and stumbled, breath catching before I forced myself on.

When the street bent, it should have been familiar. The houses leaned too close, windows dark. On the corner, a mailbox waited, the same shape, the same dent, the same tilt as the one I had just left. For a moment the envelope still burned against my palm.

A car horn split the air. Headlights flooded the curb. I stepped back, heartbeat sharp in my chest. A man shouted something through the window, words I couldn’t hear, and the light turned red above him. I crossed anyway.

My jacket pocket held the last page I hadn’t meant to keep. I pulled it out and read the line at the bottom. You don’t get to know how this ends. That’s the point.

I kept walking.

The city spread itself as if it had been laid out for this walk. The air smelled of wet concrete and faint exhaust. I passed a diner with its sign dark, chairs stacked on tables. A single napkin drifted along the sidewalk and caught on my ankle. I shook it loose. It clung for a moment before sliding away into the gutter.

A dog barked in the distance. The sound bent itself around corners. I thought of the lost-cat flyer pinned to my corkboard and wondered if anyone had ever seen that animal, or if it had always been an invention waiting to be mourned.

I thought of Francis, her pen hanging over the margin, ready to strike. Lucian came next, his underlined sentence still burning on my desk. Then my mother, pressing a napkin flat for the priest, the iron hissing, fabric stiff and hot under her hands.

I kept walking. Past a mural of faces whose eyes had begun to flake away with weather. Past a man sleeping under an awning, his coat pulled tight, his breath visible in the damp.

The city turned itself into repetition. Another intersection that looked like the last. Another mailbox leaning under the weight of rain. Another light turning red, then green, then red again.

My laces dragged. I stepped on one and stumbled forward.

I wanted to say one thing to all of them, but I didn’t know the language.

I’m going to—

fin.