Not For the Archives

Marion Cagle sent the email at 11:42 p.m. on a Thursday, five minutes after deleting a file labeled “Final_Letters.docx” and replacing it with “Final_Notes.docx,” which he assumed was the correct template. His eyes were dry from reading twenty-two stories in succession, and his wrists ached from annotating PDFs that he would forget the moment he closed them. He did not check the file. He did not need to. His commentary, written in a tone that confused incision with intellect, was thorough.

The last story had been about a girl who drew horses to cope with trauma. He could not remember how it ended. He rarely remembered the endings. Most of the writing blurred together—a parade of dying relatives, natural metaphors, and emotional revelations disguised as plot. Still, he marked every margin with brisk finality. His feedback came shaped like conclusions.

He stood in the kitchen with a glass of Glenlivet, not drinking so much as posing with it. The ice cracked once. He stared out at the amber glow of the streetlamp, listening for nothing in particular. Upstairs, his wife turned a page. The silence pleased him.

The glass was too full. He had poured it for the idea of the ritual, not the drink. The shape of the moment mattered more than the taste.

In workshop, he often told his students that writing required cruelty. You had to be willing to cut. Not just sentences, but delusions. He believed the same of teaching. Anything that did not draw blood was accommodation.

He liked to think he offered clarity—something sharper than praise, something his students would thank him for years later. He imagined them in fellowships, in residencies, speaking his name with a mix of admiration and remembered pain. He imagined their gratitude as inevitable, even if delayed.

The next morning, his inbox lit like a wound. Thirty-one emails. By noon, fifty-three. Subject lines ranged from Unprofessional Conduct to Feedback? to You Don’t Even Know Me.

His graduate assistant, Lila, sent one with the subject line Rejection letters. That meant damage.

Professor Cagle,

I just wanted to flag something you may have already seen.

The attachments sent with last night’s rejections included internal comments.

Several applicants are upset and a few have contacted the department directly.

I’ll let you know if any more messages come in.

Best,

Lila

He scrolled back to his sent folder. Opened the message. Opened the attachment.

It was not the template. It was his notes. All of them.

Each applicant had received not only a form letter but his raw assessments. Embedded marginalia. Strike-throughs. Red-font parentheticals that had once felt clever.

Reads like trauma cosplay.

A hospice setting does not automatically create gravitas.

This feels like a submission from someone who has never revised anything, ever.

An MFA might do more harm than good.

Poetic language is not a personality.

As thin as the paper it’s printed on.

And, on the final page, his private list.

Sentimentality is not emotion

No story needs a child unless the child will suffer

If your protagonist cries, make sure the reader doesn’t

A good story ends before it explains itself

Earn your catharsis

The email had gone to every applicant. Seventy-nine of them. No blind copy.

The silence in his office expanded, thick and inert. The laptop screen still glowed. He could see his own reflection in the glossy surface just above the keyboard. His face looked unfamiliar. Slightly hunched. Grayer than he remembered.

He closed the lid of the laptop without shutting it down and sat in his chair, not breathing, not moving, not regretting. Exposure was not the same as remorse.

That afternoon, Dean Watters emailed with the subject Urgent – Re: Confidentiality breach.

Marion,

We’ve had ten complaints and two formal letters of concern.

Communications is aware. Legal will want to ensure FERPA lines weren’t crossed.

We’re not issuing a public statement unless it becomes necessary.

Please draft a response for internal use only. Language should be firm but non-adversarial.

Let’s get ahead of it.

—R. Watters

He replied an hour later.

Dean Watters,

I regret the mistake in attachment distribution. I’ve reviewed the error and ensured it cannot occur again.

No individual was named outside of their own submission.

I do not anticipate further escalation.

Regards,

M. Cagle

He reread his reply three times before sending it. Each word was precise. Distanced. The kind of sentence that meant nothing while sounding composed.

Watters responded within minutes.

Keep a low profile. Let Lila handle applicant responses. No press. No interviews.

And for God’s sake, no Twitter.

Applicants kept writing. Some emails were profane. One simply said, You could have just said no. Another arrived with an audio file titled Me crying after reading your letter.mp3. He deleted it without opening it. One was just a photo of a paper shredder filled with manuscript pages.

But one message contained nothing at all. No subject. No text. Only an attachment: Submission_NgMia.docx

He opened it.

He could not remember her. He searched the comments he had written. They were damning.

This is not fiction. It is a transcript of mourning.

Lilacs in a bowl, again. Try originality.

Reads like something a well-meaning nurse might praise.

(Even the syntax mourns.)

Summary Comment: Emotionally sincere but lacking narrative structure. Feels like journaling. Unpublishable.

He reread the story. The voice was fragile but clear. The protagonist sat by her mother’s hospice bed and imagined every room as a house in reverse. The story did not try to impress. It tried to survive.

She had not structured it well. But he could see now that she had structured it honestly.

He did not remember reading it the first time.

That evening, he stood by the window again. His wife was upstairs again. His scotch melted again.

The glass was warmer than it had been the night before. The silence felt different. Not pleased. Not earned. Just there.

Lila came into his office the next day holding a manila folder and a face like someone approaching a bear.

“I printed the apology letters,” she said.

He did not look up.

“Only the ones who replied.”

He nodded. “Leave them.”

She hesitated. “Marion… Professor… do you want me to respond to the others?”

“No,” he said.

“Okay. Some of them seem really hurt.”

She lingered, like she wanted to add something else, but stopped short. Her fingers curled around the edges of the folder, knuckles faintly white. She placed it gently on the corner of his desk and left without waiting for more.

In the faculty lounge that afternoon, Maya leaned against the vending machine and said, “Well, you went viral.”

Greg, never missing a chance to be ironic, added, “You should workshop the email itself next time.”

“The phrase confession taped to a community center wall made it onto Reddit,” Maya said, chewing a protein bar. “You’re famous now.”

“It’s fine,” Cagle replied. “Most of them shouldn’t be writing anyway.”

No one laughed. But no one argued.

After they left, he stayed in the lounge a few extra minutes. The refrigerator hummed. A bottle of cold brew shifted in the door and clinked against the shelf. He sat with the buzz of artificial light and let it settle around him. He was not sure if he felt justified or simply preserved.

Three weeks later, the email arrived in his university inbox under the subject line Sycamore Review Final Deliberations – Voting Deadline Imminent.

He nearly archived it without reading. Then he saw the name.

Mia Ng.

She was one of the six finalists. A line beside her name: Adjunct faculty, Heartland University. MFA applicant (2025 cycle). He felt the back of his neck heat.

He read the others quickly—two Ivy grads, one published in Granta, a queer experimentalist from Vancouver, and a speculative writer he vaguely remembered dismissing last year as “Borges for BookTok.”

He clicked open Mia’s.

Title: Not for the Archives

First sentence:

The professor wore a scarf indoors and drank licorice tea from a mug that said Iowa but didn’t mean it.

He exhaled through his nose. It was already sharper than her last work. The style had changed. Cleaner. Crueler.

There was no apology in the tone. No plea for understanding. Just a steady dissection of power, dressed as fiction.

A few paragraphs in, the professor character—a man called simply the Reader—began offering feedback.

Your protagonist is limp. Emotional men only work if they die.

Poetic flourishes are masks. You are not allowed to flinch and weep at the same time.

Catharsis has to be earned. (Yours isn’t.)

Each bit of critique landed like a foot on the throat of a tender story submitted by a woman who had never been allowed to speak plainly.

The story turned. The protagonist—an unnamed writer, vaguely adjunct-shaped—began revising a manuscript. Her edits mirrored the Reader’s phrases, mimicking his cadence.

Her pain, though acute, lacked aesthetic discipline.

(Not all wounds qualify as narrative.)

He scrolled faster.

There were italics scattered like confessions.

You cannot teach what you never learned to endure.

Your taste is a wound you forgot to suture.

This story is tired because you are.

He rubbed his temple.

Then came the commandments. She had not even tried to disguise the structure. It was his, inverted.

A scalpel is not a pen.

If you wound, admit it is not to teach.

Gatekeeping is not mentorship.

There is no art in humiliation.

If you call it rigor, show your scars.

The signature followed.

—C.

He sat back in his chair. The fluorescent light buzzed. He clicked over to the group chat for the board of judges. New messages were arriving.

This piece gutted me.

That list. That list.

She weaponized critique and made it art.

Feels like it was written with blood.

I want to teach this.

He minimized the window.

Another tab was open—his notes from the original Mia Ng submission. The phrase reads like therapy jumped out in his own font.

He remembered writing that one quickly, with the confidence of someone who believed that emotional truth could be dismissed if not packaged properly. He had not paused. He had not wondered what she meant to say.

That evening, the board held a final Zoom call to determine the winner. Marion signed in with his camera off. The screen populated with squares: Linda Nguyen from Oberlin, Darren from the Michigan MFA, Sia Patel from somewhere with a Guggenheim sticker behind her.

“I think we’re all agreed?” Linda said.

“Unanimous,” Darren replied. “It’s Ng.”

“She did something dangerous,” said Sia. “I don’t think anyone else came close.”

“She didn’t write a story,” Linda said. “She carved an indictment.”

“I love how she echoes the voice of authority and turns it into a kind of ghost. It haunts the reader. Like she used someone else's blood to write it.”

Marion did not speak.

“Marion?” Sia prompted.

He clicked his microphone. “It’s a good piece,” he said. “It has formal confidence.”

Then he logged off.

The silence after the call was not clean. It clung to the corners of his screen, like static that would not settle.

The next day, an email arrived from the Sycamore editor.

As a member of our board, could you please provide a short endorsement blurb? Three to four sentences for use in our press release and social channels.

He opened a blank document and typed:

Mia Ng’s story is formally elegant, intellectually exacting, and emotionally resonant. It explores the tension between authority and erasure with strength.

He removed subtlety. Then re-added it.

He stared at the screen.

He typed:

It is a necessary and unflinching interrogation of who gets to speak, and who gets to be heard.

He signed it:

Marion Cagle

Then he added:

Judging Board Member, Sycamore Review

He hit send.

That night, he went to his office after hours. The halls were empty. A printed copy of Not for the Archives sat on his desk. Someone had highlighted parts in yellow.

Beside the final line—

She did not respond to the Reader. She submitted.

—a note in pencil read: God, this is good.

He did not recognize the handwriting.

He sat down. Took out a pen. Began to mark a student story from a new batch. The first sentence was too long. He drew a line through it. Wrote:

This doesn’t work. It needs—

He stopped. Put the pen down. Tore the page from the packet. Dropped it in the trash.

The light above him flickered once. Then held steady.

The story went live on a Monday. The Sycamore Review homepage featured a sepia-toned photo of a pen balanced across a torn notebook page. Beneath it, the words: Emerging Writer Prize – Winner: Mia Ng.

He did not click it. He did not need to.

By midweek, links circulated through the department. Someone posted it to the grad cohort Slack. A printed copy appeared on the corkboard by the elevator. Another was taped, without comment, to the door of his office. He left it there for two days before removing it with steady hands and no expression.

In workshop, things shifted.

A student read aloud from a story about two sisters caring for their dying father. When he spoke afterward—something clipped about emotional ballast—the room felt suddenly hollow. A student named Lena met his eyes and did not blink.

One boy muttered, not softly enough, “That’s a Cagleism.”

He stopped speaking. Let the silence expand. Then said, “We’re done for today,” and dismissed class fifteen minutes early.

The next day, Lila poked her head in.

“They’re still talking about it,” she said.

“About what?”

She hesitated. “The story. Mia’s. A couple of undergrads printed it out and passed it around in the dining hall. One of the English Ed students is teaching it in her practicum.”

He gave a small, sharp smile. “It’s quite the career move, isn’t it?”

Lila said nothing. She remained in the doorway, not entering.

“What?”

“I’m supposed to stay neutral,” she said.

“But you aren’t.”

“No.”

He waited for her to leave. She didn’t. After a moment, she added, “I used to think your notes made me sharper. That I could take them. Like sparring.”

He said nothing.

“I think I was wrong,” she said. “You were just unkind.”

Then she walked out. He did not stop her.

He taught his next class without commentary. No annotations. No printed feedback. He asked questions that led nowhere and let the silences fill in.

That evening, he sat at his kitchen table with a half-finished syllabus and a whiskey he didn’t want. His wife asked if he had heard about the adjunct from his program who won the prize.

“Yes,” he said.

“I read it.”

He waited.

She said, “It reminded me of when you used to write.”

He looked at her. She was folding laundry, not meeting his gaze.

“I don’t write anymore,” he said.

“I know,” she replied.

There was no softness in her voice. Only the matter-of-fact tone of someone taking stock. She left the room with a folded towel in her arms and did not return.

That night, he dreamt of a lecture hall with no doors. He stood at the front, holding a stack of papers. Every seat was filled, but none of the students had faces. He spoke, but no sound came out. One by one, they turned to ash. He woke before the dream ended. The room was cold.

By the end of the month, the buzz had quieted. Mia Ng gave no interviews. She did not post on social media. She accepted the prize money and disappeared from public view. It made her story more dangerous. Mythic. The students began calling her C. as a kind of code.

One morning, he found a printed line from her story taped to the whiteboard.

If you call it rigor, show your scars.

He erased it without a word.

He no longer used the list. He stopped signing feedback with his surname. He dropped the habit of parentheticals. He still italicized the occasional word, but less often. The italics made him feel watched.

He sat at his desk one afternoon and reopened Not for the Archives. He had saved it as a PDF. No markings. No comments.

He read it through again. The final line still hit like a brick.

She did not respond to the Reader. She submitted.

He closed the file.

He opened a blank Word document.

He stared at the cursor. It blinked.

He typed:

The voice I used is no longer mine.

He kept it. Added nothing else.

He turned off the monitor. Left the office lights on.

On his way out, he passed the department lounge. Through the window, he saw Lila laughing with two other graduate students. Her posture was relaxed. One of them handed her a printout of something, and she held it like it mattered.

The hallway was quiet. No one stopped him on his way out.

That night, he dreamt again of the faceless class.

But this time, he was seated with them.

And someone else stood at the front of the room.