(Adapted from lines in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.)

My phone rang on the table beside my bed at nine o’clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged ringing was muffled as I pressed “Stop,” and it soon died away.

Too soon for me to go outside. So I opened my laptop and logged into the submissions inbox. How many today? I did that every weekend, but today was different; I remembered. A good and bad day for Exclamation Mark. The inbox was stacked almost knee-deep in snow.

Forty-one new submissions.

I sighed. I still felt feverish because I knew it would take hours to read through everything. But anything is more fun than uploading pieces to WordPress.

Can a person who’s warm understand one who’s uploading pieces to WordPress?

Then a reversal, two submissions later: A submitter has accidentally sent 32 submissions because they clicked on the “submit” button too many times. This wins my contentment. I was reading the submission again. 

After that—I send the pieces to the other editors. And as a collective we decided their “fate.”

Then I went outside, and a new day opened before me. And this was just one of the 153 days in the life of an Exclamation Mark editor, from bell to bell.

A Note to Our Readers

Due to a scheduling error, we were only able to publish two creative pieces in this issue instead of our usual three-four. We apologize for this change and appreciate your understanding. We’ve include a short editorial feature to fill the remaining space,  which we hope to offer you just an enjoyable “exclamation” at the editors who run Exclamation Mark.