Sublimation of an Epic – Salma Galal

September 24, 2025

So you’ve been in NYC about two months and you know to never ever call it the Big Apple because that’s definitely what tourists say and it just sounds plain stupid, you’ve been here about two months closer to three because it’s edging into mid-October and the leaves are changing and Billie Holiday’s song is inevitably clanging around in your head because your mom used to play it all the time back in Redding even though it was barely fall there it’s not like anything changed, you’ve been here almost three months and you’re about to be published. The lit magazine, because you realize that’s how people abbreviate around here, you can say lit magazine or lit mag or just mag but not literary magazine because that sounds pompous and uptight even though you find a lot of people here pretentious anyway but there’s something raw about it, the underground movement going so anti-bourgeousie they’ve come back the other way round the circle, and damn you wouldn’t even think to say bourgeousie until about a month ago more like two, the lit magazine had emailed you two weeks ago. Two solid weeks on the dot. You know because you checked the date on your Google Calendar and just stared at it gaping like a fish out of water during the lecture on Modernism. This means it’s been six solid months since your dad died. You realize you’ve shuffled the acceptance email to the forefront of your mind, ahead of that greeting card for a final goodbye. You didn’t really say goodbye though.
        Well, anyway, it’s been two weeks and the launch is soon. You’ve been in this city two months almost three and don’t have NYC garb yet. This dictates a leather jacket, a T-shirt with something like Kafkaesque in a Serif Type Font, jeans that are black and rough-edged with what looks like deodorant stains. The launch party is in Manhattan, where you haven’t visited. You’ve only gone on the Subway to go to and from school. NYU is hard to romanticize because it’s just buildings. You’re not sure you’ve got what the girls who do vlogs while drinking matcha or the guys who wheel around their cinematic camera around campus. Matcha isn’t even that great.
        Maybe it’s residue from what happened but you’re not sure it is. It’s bitterness, yeah, it’s got to be that. In your creative writing class you got off the waitlist for, the students hated your first story about a girl who deliberates taking nepenthe in ancient Greece on the hillside with an old man. It’s giving Song of Achilles.
        Oh God, anyone who’s on BookTok has a fundamental lack of brain cells.
        You look up that book later. Yeah, no wonder you’ve never heard of it. They probably wouldn’t sell that in Redding.
        You try again with a poem that analogues opening and digging the glistening seeds of a pomegranate out to losing your virginity. You can be rough or gentle and there’s something hypnotic and almost beautiful about it. Maybe it didn’t translate well or you didn’t have a right to it. It’s so male gazey. Feels fetishistic. You didn’t explicitly write it about a girl, you know there’s more connotations when a girl gets down to it but it’s a social construct and you feel like it in a way anyone who does it is baring themselves, opening up the raw red parts of them. But maybe you’re insensitive and the prof, not professor you say prof, gives you a 10/20.
        So fuck it. You’ve been writing your whole life but maybe that doesn’t make you a writer. Maybe you’re a hack, a kid playing with costumes when it’s time to grow up and get the fuck real. So you write about your father’s death. A fucking bee sting. There’s an anticlimax in it. He never carried an epipen, insisting it wasn’t needed, even though he only survived when he was little because he went to the ER. The man who refused to ever go to the doctor. Who had a beer almost every week night. If it wasn’t the bee it would’ve been his liver. You didn’t really realize how angry you were until you wrote it all down, and by the end of it you were red as a pomegranate without any tenderness and shaking. A huge block of paragraph that felt vindictive. You didn’t feel peace from it. If anything it made you angrier, and you were gulping constantly in bed that night, trying to swallow all the poison that began to separate from your blood, water becoming viscous oil. Trying to rework it, de-evolve it, turn it back into just water that just flows along. Water, plain water, not tears. The next night, down in one of the dorm study rooms because your roommate complained your typing kept him awake the night before, you wrote a prelude to an epic. The idea that reality shifts depending on people’s beliefs, there used to be a Jupiter or Zeus and Persephone or Prospina and then there became the archangel Gabriel and the personification of Death. The Second Coming was really the First and changed the old gods into Abrahamic. You forgot to title it and hit submit on the first Untitled Doc that came up for the assignment. It was 11:58 pm. You can only seem to be productive between 10 and midnight. In the brackets of time alongside them you either sleep or drift open-mouthed, waiting for nourishment from this so very vibrant city.
        You clicked on the doc to double-check at 11:59 because the way it looked from your vantage point was wrong and it was the rant wall of text about Dad. It hit midnight and you went into class the next day white as a sheet. The prof not professor was already calling you aside as you approached. It’s incredible, truly a raw piece of writing. You have so much potential. You stood there, slack-jaw wider than normal as she recommended this magazine, popular with the undergraduate folk, very real and unpretentious. I think it would find a perfect home.
        All class, you hovered your mouse over the PDF, the webpage looming behind the Downloads. As it trembled there you thought of half a bee’s body, only the black stripes stripped and compressed to the tip of your finger, harbinger of the apocalypse. You thought of your mom, telling you you can’t slow down, that you’re going somewhere. He can’t pull us down with him. This was after one of the ten-hour shifts and your brother always used to tell you to take those homecomings with a grain of salt but you learned that was her at her most vulnerable, raw. You bit your lip to the bead of a pomegranate and clicked SUBMIT.
        You’re going to tell her about it only after the launch party, when you have a copy of it in your hands, your name in print on those glossy pages and the proof solid enough to grasp. It’s not like you own anything nicer than a dress shirt, black and what you wore to the funeral, but hey it’s NYC and it’s underground and we’re gritty and raw and real damn it so take your hillbilly white trash apparel and don it proudly down the metro lines all the way to Manhattan. You’re authentic. That’s what they like about you. You don’t have to keep stitching yourself back together with seams of a different material from fantasy stories and hey, that’s fine, they like you Frankenstein, they like you torn apart and patchy. Trauma sells.
        Inside the bar they’re hosting the launch the light is purple and gold and the music throbs in a distorted growl and you didn’t drink enough water today so your head hurts. You stand in the corner and the noise from the microphone drowns out because you realize you haven’t checked Life 360 today. Mom is still at the hospital. Matt’s location is still off. You click onto Instagram and his story looks like it’s in a trailer park, maybe one of the ones near Whiskeytown Lake. The grass looks gray and it’s evening there, too. You feel like you’re on a different planet. You like the story and text him: Miss you man. He’d come back from school in Arizona for the funeral and, as far as you’re concerned, hasn’t left California again. Redding sucks people in, you adore the crispness here because you can feel it cutting up your lungs in little precise strokes. The heat there was a physical brick to breathe in. If you have to explain to one more person asking why you, a Californian, doesn’t surf or go to the beach daily, you think you’ll…
        Well, you don’t really know. All this anger and nowhere to put it and when it’s not anger it’s doldrums. This isn’t right, you’re in the big city, you’ve made it up, and watching Dad’s secretary shuffle into the office he never left despite running his own business and gritting your teeth so hard you thought you heard them crack and when he asked you to hand him a pen you kind of smacked it into his palm and he slapped you across the face and this colossus of an ass has been defeated by something the size of your thumbnail is off, the brick has dissolved and there’s just clean freezing air to make you bleed tender and you should be happy why aren’t you happy?
        You hiccup on a sob and walk up to the mic with jelly legs because you’re supposed to do a reading from the page. You start in a random spot, holding the glossy monument to your success, stumble on the words and your legs are shaking and your breath is wheezing and you expect to see plumes in front of you and God you’ve never used the word plumes a day in your life until now and when you’re done and trying to blink away the tears the girl, more like the woman who runs the magazine with her smoky eyes and her shredded blouse puts her hand on her heart and drops her head and she looks like she’s going to some punk funeral.
        You sit at the bar, which is mostly blue light, and order a Long Island which is cheesy but you aren’t from here and it looked good on TV so maybe it’s okay. A girl sits next to you soon enough with the lit mag clasped to her chest. Your story made me nauseous. She says it in a complimentary, sensuous way, and from the hand on your thigh you’re guessing the intent. Maybe she’s lonely or horny or gets off on depressing shit or she finds you attractive but you’re two for four so that’s good enough, and her mouth tastes like Long Island iced tea. What you think it would taste like because you didn’t actually start drinking it.
        Your girlfriend broke up with you the same time your dad died. She didn’t know and she was a year older, off to Santa Barbara and already meeting guys with the bodies of sculptures who could hold their liquor and you felt her slipping away faster than you felt Dad because Dad is was just like wham bam thank you ma’am for getting rid of him and she was the slow ooze of fruit juice turning overripe and too aged and you didn’t tell her about it because you wanted her to stay because she loved you not out of pity but she didn’t and now here you are, underneath the cradle of a stranger’s thighs and she pants; God, when you said you actually felt relieved— and you did, you really did, because things were coming apart at the seams and your mom was tired and your brother hardly existed there and now he exists too much because he hasn’t left Redding sucks you in and doesn’t let go and you were tired of him and the bee was your savior and you’re really terrible but it’s all biological chemical hormonal knee-jerk that you needed to get away you needed to lift off the weight you needed your glossy wings and sweetness in your mouth and it’s all just reactionary as she clenches around you and your vision whites out the streetlights into holy rupture.

In the morning you’re by yourself. She’s not far, you can hear the shower and see the Columbia sweatshirt laid out on the bed. She must be a first year like you. Does she call it the Big Apple? You’re somewhere in Manhattan, still, you’re pretty sure. Your mouth tastes sour, spoiled. You check your phone and Matt has answered: same. It’s more than you’ve gotten from him for weeks. The lit mag is actually pressed to the stickiness of your back, following you like a shroud when you rolled onto your belly, fused in the night. You lift it away and press it to your chest. It’s got the picture of chipped red nails with a cigarette dangling. You look at the discarded clothes, the puke-yellow desk, a cracked IKEA mug. Your funeral shirt is stained with lipstick. The magazine is open to your story, the pages torn a little from your movements. You lift your hand in the gray light, thinking it looks a bit like a corpse. You wonder if that’s how Dad’s skin looked. You don’t know. You didn’t go up to the coffin. It looked like that just bigger, colossal, monumental. This ache in your chest bleeds ink, not water or oil. You can write an epic with it.