Roses and Rot by Kat Howard Page A

bones to ash. Everything went black around the edges, and I swayed forward, catching myself on my desk. The crackle of the flames got louder, and I ran outside.
    “Helena! What are you doing?” I stopped on the edge of the fire, close enough to grab her if I had to, far enough to feel almost safe.
    She was soot-stained and covered in rage. “I’m not good enough. This fellowship was supposed to make me better, but the only thing I’ve learned is how inadequate I am. I quit. I’m done.” She tossed another notebook, and watched, eyes hard, as the cover began to bubble and curl.
    “Helena, I—” My stomach clenched, and my head was full of burning words. Sweat beaded up on my forehead. I was shaking. The words, the pages. My hand.
    I bit the inside of my mouth until I tasted blood. I wasn’t there. I was here.
    I was here.
    “Fine,” I said. “Fine. You’re right. I don’t even need to have read your work to know that it’s clearly the most facile, saccharine excuse for poetry ever written. It’s not even good enough for greeting cards.”
    She stared at me, the final notebook loose in her hand. “You bitch.”
    “Pick one or the other, Helena. Either your work sucks and deserves to be burnt, or I’m a bitch who doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Which is it?”
    She stepped back from the fire and clutched the notebook tighter in her hand. “I’m not good enough.”
    “Maybe you’re not. That doesn’t mean you should light your work on fire. On our lawn. Seriously, what the fuck?”
    “You don’t know what it’s like.”
    “Don’t know what what’s like, Helena?”
    The fire had mostly died down. Scraps of paper scattered across the lawn. My hand uncurled, no longer felt like it was burning, too.
    When Helena next spoke, her voice was harsh and raw. “What if this is all I have? If I never get any better than I am, then I’m not good enough. I’m adequate. Competent. But not good. Not fucking good enough. And don’t try to tell me there isn’t a difference.”
    There was nothing I could say to that. She was right. There was a difference between competent and good. Talent wasn’t the only thing you needed to succeed, but it was still needed. And the cruelest thing was, regular crises of ego aside, if you were competent, you could see the difference in your work. You knew how it stacked up, could measure the gaps between fine and good, and good and great. Not having enough talent seemed almost worse than not having any, because having a little meant having just enough to know what you lacked. I stood with her in silence, watching the flames burn to embers, then to ash. Watching her face, hard and lost.
    When the last of the ashes had burned away, Helena walked up the stairs and back into the house, the one remaining notebook still in her hand.

    It was impossible to settle back into my own work after that. Every time I opened my notebook I was sure I smelled smoke, even after closing the window. Even after going back downstairs, and filling the soup pot with water, and dumping it on the ashes.
    The arts have their own version of the “your mom” joke. That you need more fans than just your mom. That just because your mom liked it, or put it on her refrigerator, or thinks you should be cast as Hamlet after seeing you as the second shepherd in the Christmas play, that it doesn’t matter. That and three bucks will get you a ride on the subway.
    The punchline is that of course your mom is your biggest fan. Everyone understands that. It’s natural. The weird thing would be if she wasn’t.
    When my work got burned—when years of stories, everything I had written to that point, was thrown on the flames—it was my mother who threw them there. Who held my hand in the fire, burning me with them.

    The most dangerous thing you could do in a fairy tale was to be a girl with a mother. Because that meant your mother would die, and that death would only be the beginning of things going very,