The
Orphan
is incomplete, unpublishable, moloch-less, disrespected, bizarre and roundly rejected.
Issue 1
It was delivered by the author to a surprised editor several years ago. 'I woke up with it in my head this morning, but I don't know what the hell to do with it. See what you can manage,' the author demanded. Unable to
improve upon the sentence, the editor decided to post it as it is, starting what will hopefully be a tradition for The Orphan.
An artist unknown to the author asked him to write some copy for an exhibition catalog. The author promised something weird and irrelevant and was told this would be fine. Minds were changed; the copy was not.
This is first chapter of a novel to which a year of research, countless man-hours, at least two hundred pages of deleted digital ink, and lots of the author slamming his head into brick walls were devoted. It will never be written.
This piece was originally supposed to be twice as long, involving an aunt who took her own life and the whiskey-fueled breakdown of yet another family Christmas. However, the author feels like he can't pull it off without cheapening a life-changing event. He doesn't know if he'll ever get the nerve to finish writing about it.
The author composed this piece quite some time ago as a kind of fictional love letter to a girl whom he probably would've stalked, were he a stalker. When it was finished, it was sent to her. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in one of his most straightforward literary rejections ever.
The pictures were taken with the old One Step Polaroid camera, loaded with the now sadly discontinued 600 film. God bless its happy accidents; if you can see the beauty of the mistake, you really can't go wrong here...