Bile by Sheila Ashdown
The author sat in the library, building a paper highway. She hoped to construct some distance between herself and her subject self. Maybe that way she could write something other than self-loathing dreck about how she’d broken two hearts (hers and his) and couldn’t make it through a morning without vomiting thin, neon bile. And she means bile literally, not literarily: a real-life sickly syrup, every morning, though she tries to eat a couple saltines before that acid gets to roiling. She feels a wave hit and runs to the toilet, and when it comes up, she thinks now we’re getting somewhere! But there’s no relief in the expulsion; she’s still filled with pain and bitterness, though now it’s both literary and literal, because the bile burns on the way up and the aftertaste is awful. *** She writes in the library because, though she prefers coffee shops, you don’t have to buy a cup of coffee to sit in the library. They let you sit there for free, and even bring your own coffee in a safety mug. Most of her stories are what you’d call “thinly veiled autobiography.” It was a term tossed around like a hot potato during college writing classes, and you didn’t want to be holding that potato when the music stopped.
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