The Death of Emily Dickinson

The first rejection stole her confidence. She didn’t put her typewriter away, but she did stop mailing out the manuscripts.

Emily had stories to tell. Inspired in her youth by Shirley Jackson and Margaret St. Clair and C.L. Moore, she wanted to write weird fiction. Every time she thought she had produced something worth submitting, however, she retrieved her first story and the accompanying rejection slip. She remembered how proud she had been when mailing it out and how obvious the flaws were when she received it back from the editor.

The new story would go into “The Files.”

When Emily Dickson was seventeen, after mailing out her first story but before its return, she read about Emily Dickinson. The woman was virtually her namesake, and her story was so sad… dying a recluse, with only a handful of poems published during her lifetime. If Dickinson’s sister Lavinia hadn’t ignored her request to burn her notebooks, nobody would remember her. The teenager decided their lives would be completely dissimilar.

A year later, she hoped for nothing more than to be like the poet, remembered throughout the world for her writing even if she never had the chance to enjoy that fame. Emily honed her skills, reading extensively from writing guides and manuals and working every day. She kept every finished work in a small wooden chest, neatly arranged. Years passed. Her hobby grew into a commitment and finally into a compulsion.

A legacy left from her grandfather kept her solvent. Her attempts at relationships were abortive and uncomfortable, and she drifted into the life of a recluse. For companionship she kept a series of amiable cats.

Her confidence grew, but so did her fear. What if she was deluding herself, if she was just as bad as ever? How would she handle further rejection?

At age seventy-one, with her parents dead, she legally changed her name to Emily Dickinson. The decision appealed both to her sense of the dramatic and the absurd. She also hoped the similarities would encourage some New York publisher to release a collection of hers because of the obvious publicity angle.

At age seventy-eight, she lay on her bed stroking Spooky, the latest in a string of black toms. Her cancer had become too oppressive. She’d adjusted her bedside lamp to cast light toward the wooden chest, so she could see it as the pills took effect. Her will left clear instructions for her executor as well as a catalogue of potential markets.

She was already unconscious when the cat attempted its usual transition from the bed to the floor and crashed into the unexpected obstruction. And when the awkwardly-placed lamp shattered its bulb…

The fire spread quickly.