On my first day, they put me on novellas. A lot of the greats got their start here, the manager said. After a few months’ experience, you’ll work your way down.
I pulled a stool up to the table where the other novella workers were settled. A chute in the ceiling had dumped the manuscripts into a pile, and each woman—they were all women for some reason—worked a story at a time, trimming words with exact-o knives and brushing them into buckets.
We pay by the word, the manager said, handing me my bucket. It was labelled on the inside like a measuring cup, except instead of ounces the lines were labeled with days of the week. I was already behind. My bucket was still empty, and it was Tuesday.
As we worked, the women talked strategy: Nobody needs more than one parent; cut the father. The first page is just build up—slice it. Backstory first chapter—remove. Around 2:00 p.m. I cut a subplot about a neighbor kid who died young, pushing my bucket over the Monday line. An unnecessary dream sequence helped me reach the Tuesday line by the end of the day.
It was mindless work once you learned it. Soon, when I lay down to sleep at night, extraneous description danced behind my eyelids.
Within a month I progressed to short stories, where the older women piled their pages five or six deep and felled a dozen words at a swipe. There were no easy plotlines to remove at this table, so we worked at the sentence level. These women didn’t read as they worked, recognizing the shape of adverbs by their tails. Their deft fingers grasped the words two and three at a time, splitting sentences apart as the women gossiped.
They knew every rumor or conspiracy at the slaughterhouse; the ugly butcher on Series who never seemed to meet her goal, and her pretty girlfriend whose bucket was always mysteriously full; the writer who padded her writing with sentimentality when she knew her wife would be beneath the chute; the writers who supposedly came at night to steal words from butchers’ buckets and glue them back into the manuscripts.
It was at this table where I first heard the legend of The Widow.
They said she had started on a disassembly line, like us. In her first days she worked slowly, keeping to herself, never talking with the butchers around her. The women disagreed about how long it took The Widow to move through Shorts, but all agreed it was faster than normal. Within a month (some said two weeks) she was filling a bucket a day.
At first the managers were suspicious. No one could cut so many words without hurting the story. She was taking too many—sometimes dumping more than she kept. But when they inspected her finished manuscripts, they always found the stories were still intact. Shorter. And better.
Her cutting quickened exponentially. She spent a day on flash, an hour on drabble, five minutes filling a bucket with hint fiction shavings. The other butchers refused to sit with her, claiming the chutes didn’t drop enough to serve them all. Soon The Widow was given her own table with her own chute. Instead of a bucket, they installed a conveyer belt beside her that continuously removed the piles of words she’d cut, dumping them in a separate room where the words filled the air like snow.
There was no way to classify her. Novellas became 100-word stories. Whole series were reduced to six words. By the end they say she wore a mask and earplugs to prevent sight and sound from distracting her; she edited by touch.
In another month I was moved to the Flash Fiction table. The edits were harder there, leaving little time for gossip. This was punctuation work: turning words to semicolons and dashes. Flash cutters’ faces were deeply creased with the effort.
I never saw the lowest levels of the factory. Every darling cutter falls to her level, and I reached mine at flash. No matter how I tried, the words refused to reduce further. After every cut, the words clung to my fingers, as if by glue, and pled their case. Surely “couldn’t” wasn’t really the same as “could not.” Time and again I drew a line through the paper with my knife, then hesitated. I’d lost the nerve for butchery.
In the fall I returned to the city and got a job as a journalist, building pyramids of words for someone else to cut down. In my new life I surrounded myself with writers who claimed to love words. Who wore them on gold chain necklaces and hung them in their homes. Isolated words without context or meaning. Summer. Lunch. Vacation. I pretended to enjoy these empty words, too.
But sometimes I still thought about the final story I’d heard of The Widow: that she’d cut a story so thin it was a single word—containing character, theme, setting, and plot. Unlike the decorative words of my friends, The Widow’s word brought tears to the eyes of everyone who read it. They said it was like hearing a word spoken directly to your soul. Like hearing exactly the thing you’ve wished someone would say to you all your life.
I think about The Widow and I go back to the page I’ve filled with my pyramids. Hoping they’ll find their way to someone with a knife more accurate than my pen.
Kayleigh Shoen's fiction has appeared in XRAY Lit mag, Milk Candy Review, Crack the Spine, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Emerson College, and can be found online at KayleighShoen.com or on twitter @whowantssoup