Not Waving

A woman devolves into madness on a road trip to Las Vegas after an auto accident and several failed suicide attempts. The title comes from Stevie Smith's poem which features the lines, "I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning." Oddly enough, I wrote this long before I became an English professor (and it's nothing like my life, I hasten to add). It was rejected by one agent in Los Angeles for being "too relentlessly dark" (it was the 80s, dark was out).