Dear Nobody · one letter
You read other people’s mail for a living.
It is the first Monday of the quarter. Forty-one letters in the wire basket, a pot of gum, the pencil they issue you and the pen they trust you with. Rule of the floor: read once for the Republic, once for the sentence. Nobody says what the second read is for.
A soldier’s hand, careful, the letters built rather than written — a man who learned penmanship once, formally, and has kept it the way you keep Sunday clothes.
Dear Lisette,
Your last found me well, and the shop’s news better than any communiqué. So the Widow Perrin wants the whole window in chrysanthemums for All Souls and pretends it is her idea and not the calendar’s — take her money, sister, and take it twice; she has opinions about credit.
We are settled comfortably. We are billeted at Vercourt, by the old mill — you would know it from the postcards, the wheel is still turning and the barn is dry, which is more than the 143rd can say for theirs, so we count ourselves kings.
Send the bulb catalogue when it comes. I have been promising the lieutenant tulips in the spring, and a man who has promised tulips has to live carefully.
Plant them shallow this year. I want to see them from the road when I come home.
Your brother, who is well, and says so twice.
Two lines here break Article One — locations, units, movements. Tap them to strike them.
Bureau of
Postal Control
That is the whole game. The bars go through the words, never through the paper. Lisette will read that her brother is settled comfortably somewhere, which is where every soldier in the Republic is billeted now — the great village of Somewhere, population: everyone’s brother.
Most of every letter passes whole. That is the part the cartoons never draw.
Elsewhere on your desk are two people who have never met, whose entire relationship is the paper in front of you. Strike a line out of that and it is gone from the thing itself, not just from the page. And later — past where this excerpt stops — one of them stops writing to the front, and starts writing to you.