A number of years ago I submitted a what’s called “micro fiction” story (a story with a severe word count limit) to a magazine and it was rejected. Not a big deal, but the reason they gave!
The story involved a young guy who works in a pizza parlor having a crush on a girl he always sees dumpster-diving. He knows she’s a prostitute and a heroin addict. He doesn’t want to shame her by trying to meet her on the street, which is where he always sees her. However, he gets a chance because she calls in an order for take-out to his restaurant, just before closing time. (So there might be a chance that the unclaimed pizza will get thrown out and she can rescue it from the dumpster, which she has done before.)
So the kid arranges to be out in the alley after closing doing some sweeping and sees this chick in the dumpster. He politely accosts her and says that he was thinking of going to a steak house down the street for dinner and would she like to have a steak instead of dumpster pizza?
The gal gives him an entitled answer, that she is wearing a scarf that costs $700 and why would she want to go somewhere with a guy that makes $9.50 an hour? She walks to a waiting car with the pizza and the guy stands there. (end)
Reason for rejection: If she can afford a scarf that costs $700, WHY IS SHE DUMPSTER DIVING? No lie!
Punch line: The character was based on someone I actually knew and had known for years. She and her friends/family delighted in stealing from very high-end department stores. They bragged about it. They were also homeless prostitutes, panhandlers, and drug addicts who scorned people with real jobs.
That’s the Left for you! (Although some of them are aware that street people, bums, junkies, criminals, and psychos are the Left’s true army!)
One of my regulars was a black gal who lived at a seedy motel on the east side of town and worked as a go-go dancer, one was a bar in the industrial district of neighboring Fargo, N.D. which was near the graveyard shift of foundaries and little assembly plants just getting off.
Then, toward the close of my day shift, I took her to downtown Moorhead on the north side of the Minnesota State University campus. She told me the tips were great because black gals were a novelty there especially in the wintertime. I'm sure it didn't hurt that she was cute as well.
She always asked for me by name and told me the reason she did so was because I treated her with respect and didn't seem to look down on her for her chosen profession. When I finally worked up the nerve to ask why a pretty intelligent lady chose that line of work, she told me about the background of the 'hood in Minneapolis that she came from and just the type of people you mentioned that she needed to escape from. In addition to the good tips, her dance club work seemed like the quickest way out, she told me.
This was back in the late 1970s. I can only imagine how much worse things have gotten since.