Have a little faith

He picked up that particular file because: you know how it is. Small publishers are a funny, superstitious sort. Just normal, human superstitions, really, but amplified by the quandaries they find themselves in. Si flattered himself, though, that his own rituals were like a sailor's. He had the metaphors all set up for any given dinner party—though he himself hadn't given a dinner party for years, because he had worked out early on that you couldn't drink and cook, not to the full enjoyment of both, anyway; one or the other suffered. But: steering the ship of the house, no, better, the ark, through rough waters; telling iceberg autobiographies from the prize white whales (you had to know who your audience was before you used that one); the risk of drowning in submissions... it was all more or less there, and with a little more tidying the monologue would be perfect, Si was sure.

So when he threw Hans Myrtle's script down and suddenly saw the sign, Si felt he'd be a fool not to follow it. More than that, he'd be betraying his type, in a way, mocking the massed ranks of his occupational caste. Bad form: ill luck upon ill luck. The manuscript landed on the small patch of space on his desk that was always kept clear for at least one open work. Reading space, he called it, frequently following that with "tossing space", and seasoning the whole with a chuckle. Despite the particovered nature of the desk only its dark green leatherette was visible, its seamed buried under a dozen piles of files, books and papers.

No one pile was really distict, though, not what you'd call a tower. The sheets of Si's in-tray mingled with those in the slush pile. The slush curled up against MS PENDING. That stack never made any real money; that wasn't where the wage-earners or page-turners were to be found. It was academic stuff, mostly, and it oiled the wheels of the rest of the house, and kept the authors and the bookshops happy, because you had to be seen to be doing something or rumours would start. Anyway, PENDING bent up just as slush bent down; a stack of invoices and bills exchanged leaves with PENDING and slush, and Maggie's most-wanted—she still shared his desk Mondays and Wednesdays, much to his chagrin—was lost in the mess of any number of the above. Five or six other piles had no name: they just sort of leant against each other, like cheeky Dickensian unemployed scamps round a lamp-post.

Stacking and restacking over the months had caused the papers to settle like sand or breakfast cereal in transit. They had all found their own level to some extent, barring the minor disturbances and reshuffling that fell under Si's remit at the house. The top of the desk was stable and flat enough for Si to effectively rest his laziness on; day in, day out. Some submissions moved more slowly through the pile than the seasons themselves. An earthquake would probably cause the whole mess to wobble as one, like a jelly, but surely nothing would shift independently. If anything ever did, Si would notice in a flash.

It's not as though Myrtle's submission was heavy or anything. Dense, yes: thick glue made from boiled-down horse-shit, as per bloody usual from Myrtle's stable. But Myrtle's status as a distant acquaintance of Delft's meant that Si would have to send it for peer review—again—and there'd be consternation from said peers—again—and Myrtle would stubbornly refuse to fold in their suggestions, to let them leaven the mix—again. If anything Si was in need of a bit of light relief when he slammed down the two-thousand word opinion piece masquerading as research. Light relief, and an analgesic.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, then, that caused him to see what he was sure he saw. Because that sheaf, there... he was sure... moved.

Was that one of Maggie's? Hard to say, and Si was finding it even harder to care. Although it had only shuffled a bit away from its neighbours, in a direction that suggested it wanted to let the pressure off its pages (which yawned a bit more in relief), that motion was enough to render it no longer part of any single herd. Open season, Si thought. The slowest buffalo, he continued tangentially and with dim regard for metaphor. From here he could make out occasional words, but no sense to tie them all together. What the hell, thought Si, could it possibly be?

"Nothing ventured," he said out loud to the empty office and, feeling a bit of a fool for doing so, reached out for the manuscript in question.