Bleed on the Page

So as a teacher's assistant some of the students complained about the red pen of death. The red marks that covered the page and hacked their essays to pieces. They had spent all of two hours last night, between 2 and 4 in the morning, and I in 15 minutes had the audacity to pick it apart like I was paid to do. How dare I!

Anyway, I don't understand them. I've just done a little red pen work on my own work (actually it was pink highlighter of uncomfortable moments, not the red pen of death). The mistakes were horrible, I repeated words and couldn't get my years right. Somehow my character had spent 8, 10, and 9 years locked up in prison within two pages. That's not the next greatest superhero power, able to serve several prison sentences simultaneously.

But it wasn't just a pen cutting into my heart like the students whined about. The parts that I like get to stay (maybe changed) and the parts that I don't like are cut. More of me surfaces in the pages and I can actually read it and say, "Hey, I like that."

inspired by I seek to Delete