The TBQ Sub Reject
It was worth its weight in Burrito Supremes
Rejections. Fact of a writer’s life.
My relationship to the Paris Review-despising Taco Bell Quarterly is that I submitted something for their seventh issue—essentially the moment I found out about them, and am now the proud owner of my first TBQ rejection. It came overnight and was in my inbox when I woke up. Just like Christmas day.
Writers who submit to lit mags know that sometimes being rejected means nothing, and/or is as good as an acceptance. I had been waiting for a year, almost to the day. One year.
The staff at Taco Bell Quarterly just updated their masthead, and this move might be more obnoxious than me eating at Taco Bell, where there is nothing that will not give me a three-day bellyache, but I laughed.
That was the point.
So, in the Who-Gives-A-Flying-Fuck spirit of the magazine, I gleefully publish here the offering that gave TBQ, if not a three-day bellyache then probably eye strain.
Big Combo Individual
You were the Paga-Fantas of the group, the too-eager-to-please ball of anxiety. Of course you were. From the Spanish verb pagar, to pay, and Fanta, the disgusting soda water they serve at Taco Bell.
Don’t be too surprised. Everything is ultra-processed there. The tables are imitation plastic, printed with a halftone pattern in tranquil shades of Pantone PMS 2577 C light purple. The pattern is a third hand rendering of some hardy burl wood you only notice when you stare hard at it. For instance, you might see it while being told to clean out your locker because your services are no longer needed, or when a boyfriend responds to “What’s wrong?” with: “I just don’t love you.”
The imitation plastic and the halftone Pantone light purple are there to soothe and protect you. They express the idea that there’s no reality to any of these ultra-processed relationships. You are the pagafantas1, and well, it’s about all one can expect from a scenario where one has done their very best to be nice and winds up being everybody’s nobody. The pagafantas who dreams of friendship with a red starburst “NEW” logo, artfully placed in their peripheral vision. Such dreams are treacherous when they lull us into feeling that the world can be a place of reason and permanence.
Wake up, Chimichanga, they were pretending, like the cheese in your Bacon Cheesy Double Crunchwrap making you believe it’s cheese. They seemed to like you, the way the cheese seems to come from beautiful, yellow butter of a grass-fed cow. At least it melts, you told yourself, but you already had a suspicion, didn’t you? You were distracted by the calorie count or the possible additives.
They seemed to soften, or this was merely a fleeting loss of vital energy, an inevitable inconvenience, a weakening, while their systems performed the herculean task of digesting Quesaritos. In other words, the softening had nothing to do with you. The cheese did melt—you are not going crazy—but sadly, it was not real cheese. The red flags were snapping in the breeze, but your attention was on the gobbet of sauce that fell on your shirt.
You were fooled into paying for their soda water wisecracks, and you paid through the nose, so to speak. It drove a plastic fork through your heart to hear the Fanta flip tops, the lemon especially, popping open and fizzing. The laughter sounded a tad too lemony. Your glands were aching from it. And the worst part is that all of this is encoded in the menu, buey. Of course it is.
You are a big combo individual, an array of neural pathways that have you incapable of sniffing out the daily chemical collusion that binds us, like the saran wrap single serving trash we become. I say collusion, but there are various flavors, similar to the optional sauce packets that are always sold out. This incompetence on your part is not caused by inattention, mind you. Nothing like that. You just don’t have enough gut malice to perceive them. My theory is that it’s because of your creamy filling. There is a benevolence in you as clean and bright as a two-for-one special offer. You think the bell is real.
You are my hero.
***
Haha! I will be resubmitting to TBQ, will continue to get more rejections than acceptances, and #TBQ will continue to see my name around, because that’s what it is to be a writer.
¿A que sí?
Live más.
I think it's their loss with the rejection. The tone of this was sharp. Very sharp. I almost cut myself.
"...feeling that the world can be a place of reason and permanence."
Hah! That's an idea of which I've long since disabused myself. Life's a crap shoot with loaded dice.
Although I doubt it was your intent, all in all this made me think of microplastics in the ocean, Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and a report from the Environmental Working Group called "Body Burden 2." (https://www.ewg.org/research/body-burden-pollution-newborns)
As an old friend of mine liked to say, "We done shat our nest." May he rest in peace.
I don't know whether to be sad for him or happy that he isn't around to see how badly we trashed the place.
Oh well, the person who runs that rag is a maniac. I live in Spain, which is where that expression comes from (specifically Madrid, a very hard town). Living here is what makes me more than insouciant.