Richard Waters left work late on a Tuesday. It was the middle of January, the most frigid on record. It had been the sixth consecutive day of double-digit subzero temperatures, not factoring in the wind chills. Speaking of which: a vicious roundhouse steel-gauntleted gust clocked Richard in his unscarfed face as he trudged toward his car, a thrice-owned silver ’97 Pontiac Grand Prix. It was a shifty-eyed beast: 200,000 miles, worn shocks, gluey transmission. Richard slid behind the wheel and rubbed together his raw chapped ungloved hands, then cupped them to his mouth and blew on them with tepid puffs of still-visible breath. The Pontiac’s engine, demon-possessed, cursed and gasped and refused to start. “Oh, come on!” cried Richard. But no. Car and driver just sat there, frozen and solitary in the snow-quilted parking lot extending from a red-brick, tinted-windowed commercial office complex. Occupying the entire fourth floor and half of the fifth, Jenkins-Smoot Educational Publishers had been Richard’s employer for the past twelve years. Reflecting on this remarkable fact, and fuming at the Pontiac’s recalcitrance, Richard flipped the bird to God, Fate, and Anyone Else in Creation’s ranks who had contributed to his current muddled state. He was about to call a cab when the ignition finally turned over and precious warmth began to flood the ice-cold interior.

He maneuvered across the sparse white pasture onto the slick road, nearly colliding with a semi truck. Its taunting horn, which the driver insisted on prolonging in an uninterrupted blare, rose to a shrill crescendo before Dopplering into the distance.

Richard’s usual routine was to knock off at five, but on this day he hadn’t gotten out until well past seven. As Director of Production, it was not often that Richard reviewed galleys, a task normally delegated to an assistant or itinerant intern on his staff. But this project was special, super-extra-nacho-grandé-special, and it required the care and oversight that only a well-worn veteran of the trenches could provide. This is what he told himself, anyway, as he barricaded himself in his office while his colleagues powered down their computers and gathered their coats, a plug of congealed reassurance he’d been chewing on since the project launched.

The book was a compendium of how-to essays. Title: Arrangements in Color. Subtitle: The Art of Floral Centerpieces. Lead author and General Editor: Bertha Oswalt, grand doyenne of Greater Boston’s horticultural elite. Resided in Hyannis. Second home on the Vineyard. Identical twin daughters, both Wellesley grads. Traveled everywhere with her arthritic cocker spaniel, Hydra (short for Hydrangea). Once hosted a gardening show on WGBH. Her first book for JSEP, Bertha’s Guide to Flowering Perennials, was an out-of-nowhere smash. Publisher’s Weekly, the Boston Globe, even the New York Times had complimented its sprightly layout and colorful illustrations (neither of which Bertha had anything to do with, aside from her rubber-stamping the design proofs and accepting credit once the book began to receive glowing write-ups). “The Guide” was now in its seventeenth edition and had been JSEP’s top money-maker since its debut. Every JSEP-er, from Chief Executive to mail clerk to old dead rotting Smoot himself, knew the following statement to be irrefutable: If Ms. Oswalt were to retire, leave, or croak, the company would go under within six months.

Richard had met Bertha just the once, four or so years ago at some fancy-pants company function. After introductions had been made, the ovoid woman had not bothered to speak to him, instead proffering her gloved hand, palm down, limp-wristed, fingers delicately curled. Richard had balked, dumbfounded. (Had he been transported to the reception room of a Victorian manor-house? Had he the honor of sharing the same rarefied air as the Dowager Countess of Fuckenbridge? “My lady, I am honored to make your acquaintance.” Bow. Scrape.) He was already on his third glass of house wine (cheap, sour) and had been popping bacon-wrapped shrimp hors-d’oeuvres since he’d arrived. Clasping Bertha’s hand, spongier than pound cake, he rotated it to the vertical and gave it a thorough manly wringing, leaving behind streaks of bacon grease on the plum-hued velvet. Harrumphing, Bertha extricated her appendage and waddled off, sickly little Hydra in tow.

Bertha’s sole contact at JSEP was her editor, Otto Kane. When Bertha proposed to spearhead an anthology of flower-arrangement essays penned by a stable of hand-picked underlings, Otto had drafted a contract before she had even finished pitching the idea. (Seriously. He had had his laptop open to a boilerplate template in Word and had filled in the figures and particulars as Bertha droned.) “But … but …,” Richard would have interjected had he been present, “shouldn’t we insist on a synopsis? a working table of contents? writing sample? development strategy?” No, if Otto said it could be done …

Fast-forward three months.

Half the schedule obliterated. Forty manuscript pages—forty!—out of a proposed 250. Everyone in a state of blind panic, Otto excepted.

Richard had assigned the pages to Sandy, a pleasant, silver-haired divorcée, and, in Richard’s professional estimation, the best copyeditor in town, gunslinger and godsend in one. Send Sandy forty pages of incomprehensible sludge and a four-day deadline, and two days later she’ll return thirty pages of lush sentences seamlessly paragraphed, author’s voice uncompromised, checked and double-checked against both house style and the Chicago Manual.

The moment Sandy plopped the wrinkled printout into his lap, however, red pencils sticking out of her head at all angles, a look of anguished befuddlement creasing her normally bright, ruddy face, was the moment Richard began to appreciate how deeply into the dung Otto had driven him.

“Here!” said Sandy, mortified. “Take a look at this and tell me what to do. I can’t make heads, tails, or torsos of it.”

Richard’s jaw dropped—it would have come unhinged and thudded onto his desk if such an action were possible.

What follows is the opening sentence from “An Introduction to Silk Flowers,” submitted as manuscript by someone who actually went by the name of Haley S. G. Mittenthorpe-Cruz:

"The reasons why why you may want to look into procuring sikl flowrs is cause these artificial flowers though they be are beutifull the extreme, an absolute de-light to manage and take care of for purchased easily cheaply at any gardners or any crafts shoppe in your imediately area."

Two weeks later, at 4:30 p.m. on that frigid January Tuesday, Otto had called the Director of Production into his office and proceeded to rebuke said director for the delays that Otto himself had precipitated the day he green-lit Bertha’s daft whim.

Thirty seconds had elapsed when Richard stormed out, leaving Otto to fulminate solus.

Richard had not spoken a word.

Next Chapter: Part One: The First Sphere, Chapter II