Wielding the Axe

I've been struggling with a story for the past few months, trying to find a home for it, but the response has always been - we enjoyed it but...
This week I decided it needed editing. Serious editing. It has been trimmed and clipped many times but has always come in at just over 6500 words.
I decided to be brutal.
There had to be tears.
There are a lot of markets that take stories of no more than 4000 words. For this story I've long resisted. This story is one of my darlings. Surely chopping out a full third of it would rip the guts out. Well it took me a week. First a thousand words, then five hundred. Then a few more here, a few more there and, well, the story now weighs-in at 3993. And it's better by far. Nothing is lost, save some beautiful, flowery, purple self-indulgence. What is left is the bones; a sun-bleached skeleton of a story that gets right down to it and doesn't muck about around the edges. Who'd have thought.
The story is called...
I'll tell you what it's called if I sell it.