Steph sat down to write. Next to her was one of her three cats. It was the one who farted a lot. Even in her precious, furry, deep-breathed sleep, the flatulence persisted. 

The house was cold and the tight and muffled feeling in her ear distracted her. She was trying to understand what it was saying but the sensation mostly made her feel anxious and irritated. She didn’t want to write today. She wanted to lie on the couch, eat Doritos, and snuggle with her flatulent cat. 

“I promised myself I’d write though,” she said to herself. So she sat down and began typing:

Zelda always felt that humans were more red in tooth and claw than any animal she’d ever encountered. It wasn’t that she was raised in the woods or anything like that. In fact, she’d been raised in 1970s Brooklyn – back when it was a very different place than it is now. She lived in a third-floor walk-up with her mother and her Depression-era grandparents. 

What the hell did she know about Brooklyn? She realized she could change it to Chicago, though she didn’t know enough about the Windy City to make it believable. She highlighted the paragraph and deleted it.

“But it doesn’t have to be perfect,” she reminded herself. Again. “Honestly, it doesn’t even have to be believable. You wrote a story about an asshole cat teaching yoga three weeks ago,” she laughed a little.

She no sooner finished her giggle when Perfectionism emerged; that raven-haired beauty full of rage, shame, anger, and fear. “I fail to see what’s so amusing,” she said with that voice that coated Steph’s brain like an oil slick. “As you know, if you’re not writing something of great brilliance, that just proves you suck. Which, by the way, you do.”

She couldn’t entirely disagree, though she felt Perfectionism’s approach was a little harsh. Nevetheless, she returned to the keyboard:

My first memory of Pelko was when I was six. I was at the Canadian-American border with my grandparents who still lived in Canada part-time. Being at the border has no relevance. Being with my grandparents does. Particularly my grandmother. 

She stopped and looked it over. She did have a pivotal moment at the Canadian border with her grandparents when she was six years old. While she was sitting in the backseat of their car and staring down at the sheen on her patent leather Mary Jane shoes, she was violently gripped by the understanding that she was going to one day die. Just like that. She would be no more. Bite the dust. Cease to exist. And it scared the hell out of her. “No need to revisit that one today,” she said, deleting that paragraph as well.

“That’s best,” said Perfectionism. “It’s hardly a legitimate story idea. Who cares about your revelation?” Perfectionism temporarily wrapped her lithe and sinewy black-clad body around Steph’s frontal lobes before sliding down into her gut. “Ya know what?” she asked, not really seeking an answer. “You should just give up. It’s pointless, really. So why bother?”  

Steph tightened her hands into fists. Not as a result of some burgeoning idea to wage war with Perfectionism. (This was a lost cause, she’d already learned.) It was mostly to warm her fingers. Sure, she could turn up the heat in the house. But she knew she didn’t really deserve that sort of comfort. 

“Honestly, I’m not really sure why I bother,” she said. “I mean, I guess at the end of the day, that’s who I’m doing this for…”

“That’s the person for whom I’m doing this,” Perfectionism interrupted, holding up her hand to observe her obsidian black nails and then poking their pointed ends into the soft tissues of Steph’s lungs to make her cough. It was an unpleasant feeling.

What was also unpleasant was the January sun shining behind her heavily curtained windows. She longed to sit in the warmth and life-affirming brightness of its beams. But it was four degrees outside. Fahrenheit. And her 100-year-old windows were drafty and leaked. 

Gathering her resolve, Steph sat down and began typing again. “You can do this,” she said quietly to herself, while Perfectionism, with her dog-like hearing, just laughed at the statement. And so it went. One silly sentence after another came pouring out. She’d type it and then erase it. Type another and erase it. She did this over and over. Then finally, she began to type:

Steph sat down to write. Next to her was one of her three cats. It was the one who farted a lot. Even in her precious, furry, deep-breathed sleep, the flatulence persisted. 

The house was cold and the tight and muffled feeling in her ear distracted her. She was trying to understand what it was saying but the sensation mostly made her feel anxious and irritated. She didn’t want to write today. She wanted to lie on the couch, eat Doritos, and snuggle with her flatulent cat...

She shut her laptop, stretched, and yawned. Grabbing her farty feline and a bag of Doritos from the kitchen, she headed to the couch where she situated herself under a thick blanket, snuggled in with her cat, and began to diligently consume the Doritos. Perfectionism was sitting right there next to her, of course.

She wasn’t going anywhere.