I am thrilled that my short story, “Match,” has been accepted by The Madison Review, coming out in the spring!

This was a rather mysterious acceptance. For one thing, the invitation came through my Yahoo email, which I only use for online shopping and generally spammy purposes, never for personal use, and for sure not for my literary correspondence. My first thought was, malicious spybot malware invader?

There was an easy way to check, however, so I went into my submissions records, both my Word document and onto Duotrope, which is the go-to site for writers to track their submissions. No trace in either place of having submitted “Match” to The Madison Review.

At this point I was getting rather confused, so I checked Submittable, which is the online server used by the magazines themselves. No indication that “Match” had ever been sent to The Madison Review.

By now I was really stumped. How could four different sources have no record of my having submitted the story? The acceptance had come from the magazine’s official email address, however…

Tentatively, I sent off a message to the Fiction Editor along the lines of, “I know I must sound dotty, but is this real?” The next day I received a lovely reply from Will Conley. The submission, he told me, had been sent in one year and three months ago, and after having been misplaced for all this time, it was found, and they loved it.

So it just goes to show, in a universe filled with flukes, twists and turns, and a serendipitous sense of the absurd, we might as well slip those secret messages into the glass necks of bottles to be sent out to sea. We never know when our message might be found.