Free Roses and Rot by Kat Howard

said. “I’ve decided it’s the weight of expectations and/or my own guilt manifesting.”
    Helena slammed the cupboard so hard it bounced open again.
    “Do you have something you’d like to share with the class?” Ariel asked.
    “You’re both idiots. Of course you’re being watched. We all are. You think they don’t care about which one of us is the best, that you’ve made it to the top just because you got in?”
    “I’m sure they do, Helena, but no one from Melete is going to be looking in my windows at night while I’m writing,” I said.
    “I wouldn’t be so sure.” She stared into her mug like she was using it to divine the future.
    “Helena. I live on the third floor.”
    Ariel snorted out a laugh.
    “Laugh all you want,” Helena said. “But if you’re smart, you’ll pay attention to those feelings. Getting in here was only the beginning.”

    October had come to Melete, and brought apple cider weather with it. The air wasn’t truly cold, but sharp and bright, the knife-edge promise of oncoming winter. The leaves were a quiet conflagration on the trees, but every day more and more dropped, baring the skeletons of branches to the darkening sky. The days were shorter, and slid through each other faster.
    Melete was no longer new. This was our place now—we knew the paths under our feet, knew the sounds and the scents that surrounded us. It had become home, become very nearly ordinary. All of the strangeness, all of the things that astounded us, that we had exclaimed over when we first arrived, were now commonplace. As we began to see things as ordinary, we saw the cracks in the perfection, and the cracks in ourselves as well.
    When you go somewhere to be alone with yourself and your art, the problem becomes that you are alone with yourself and your art. For some people, that aloneness becomes the abyss, staring back. It wasn’t the kind of thing that got advertised in the promotional materials, but every year there were people who chose not to finish their residency, and left Melete early. We had our first in early October, a painter.
    “I didn’t know him, but Ali, the woman who has the studio next to mine, lived in the same house as he did, and she told me he spent, like, three days just walking around outside, not eating or showering or anything,” Marin said. “Then he went back to his room, packed up everything except his paints and canvases and stuff, and declared he was unworthy of his muse.”
    “His muse?” I asked, shaking my head. Ridiculous.
    “That’s where things get really interesting,” Marin said, leaning against the railing of the porch stairs. The late-morning sun was warm, casting gold over everything. “Because it seems like his muse was more than just metaphorical.
    “Ali also said there was a woman—some utterly gorgeous supermodel-type—who had been coming around at all hours to see him. And they had a fight. Like, a loud screaming fight. Ali overheard her calling him worthless and mediocre. She said his art was no use to her, and so he wasn’t either.”
    “Ouch,” I said.
    “Right? Still, if you leave for no reason other than your maybe-girlfriend says you suck, you probably weren’t going to have much of a career anyway. I mean, how do you get to the point of being good enough to get in here without also learning how to say ‘fuck you’ to the people who tell you you’re not? Or did he just live in some magical world where he never got a rejection or a bad review?” She shook her head.
    “Probably the latter,” I said. “For those of us who don’t audition, who work on our own when we want to, instead of in required classes, this may be the first time we’ve had to think about how good we are, and how much we’ll have to work to get to where we want to be. Whether it’s even going to be possible for us to work hard enough to get there.
    “Maybe,” I continued, “this was the first time someone had ever told him he wasn’t a modern