Throwback Thursday: 'The Theft of Confidence' by Soramimi Hanarejima

Confidence Tricks

We published our first story from literary trickster Soramimi Hanarejima, ‘The Theft of Confidence’, in the Winter 2018 issue. Since then, Soramimi has become a five-timer, and you can get all five stories with the Soramimi Hanarejima Collection below. To whet your appetite, here’s an excerpt from ‘The Theft of Confidence’ from Issue 17, on sale now till the end of June.

The Theft of Confidence

Soramimi Hanarejima

Now that the loss of her confidence follows a clear pattern, you need to figure out how that pattern can be broken. That means figuring out the rest of the pattern, the middle of it. You know the beginning and the end of the daily cycle all too well now.

She starts the day full of confidence, just brimming with it during your breakfast dates together. She wields such fantastic amounts of self-assurance over blueberry pancakes and granola with yogurt, like she’s ready to negotiate multiple high-stakes deals simultaneously. She speaks with bright eyes and fluency in an impassioned dialect of authority that intersperses gestures decisively among forthright words. You love it. So much that, as someone who often needs semi-regular confidence boosts, you could get jealous.

But you don’t. Instead, you get concerned. Because after work, when you meet no longer for cocktails but for the coffee she badly needs, she’s got precious little confidence left. Barely enough to improvise a great dinner with the miscellaneous ingredients on hand in her kitchen. Doubt suggests that the two of you dine out instead.

This can’t continue. Those morning displays of confidence suit her so well. You can’t bear to see her regress to her previous self: the obsessive worrier always accompanied by an entourage of insecurities. For now, sleep replenishes her confidence, but who knows how restorative slumber will be in the long term?

You need to determine what happens to her confidence during business hours.

Find out what happens next in Issue 17, Winter 2018 …

Soramimi Hanarejima is a Pulp Lit five-timer, with stories in issues 28, 35, 39, and 45, as well as the above story in Issue 17. A writer of innovative fiction and the author of Visits to the Confabulatorium, Literary Devices for Coping, and Fix, Forgive, or Forget. Soramimi’s recent work has appeared in various literary magazines, including Panoply, Foliate Oak, and Rigorous.

Collect all five issues of Pulp Literaturefeaturing Soramimi’s stories with the Soramimi Hanarejima Collection!