The rejection letter sat on the kitchen table, a crisp white rectangle mocking her with its polite words. Amelia hadn’t moved from the spot in front of the window all morning. The sunlight, usually a welcome guest, now felt intrusive, highlighting the dust motes dancing in the air like miniature taunts. Her breakfast, a half-eaten bowl of cereal, sat congealing on the counter, the milk curdling. She couldn't bring herself to care. The silence in the apartment was deafening, punctuated only by the incessant tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway, each tick a tiny hammer blow against her chest.
She picked at a loose thread on her worn cardigan, her fingers clumsy and unresponsive. The manuscript, her heart's work, the culmination of years of dreaming, was dead. It felt like a piece of her had been amputated. She pictured the publisher's editor, a woman she'd built up in her mind as the gatekeeper of her future. That woman's polite words, now a sentence of professional demise, echoed in her thoughts.
The curtains were drawn, and the world was outside, somewhere else. The outside world didn’t seem to care that a tiny piece of her soul was extinguished with the rejection.