Archive > Vol. 22 no. 1

D. Nurkse

The Letter That Never Arrives

She writes: I’m sending you this message from before the war.

The criminal hasn’t been elected. The frontier wasn’t breached. The two-thousand-pound bombs never fell. In the discussion — is this genocide or a mopping-up operation? —  no one voiced eloquent opinions.

Picture the city in early morning sunshine. The wide boulevards freshly hosed. Sanitation workers in yellow vests yawning and heading home. Children running to school. One skips for extra momentum. Leather satchels jounce against their thighs. Their mouths open and close in unison. They are singing, but their eyes are fast asleep.

Steel grates rise on a bodega. The smell of bread, intimate, more familiar than my own body. That insidious yeastiness. The baker blows flour off his white hat.

The crowds assemble sleepily to listen to the loudspeaker. The high clock is blank and radiant as a human face. The steeple bell begins to strike — it completes the hour but now it just keeps on. Every fourth stroke is dead.

To reach you, there, in the future, on the other side of the triumphant decree. where the criminal sits in power, I must burn this letter in the sink, smutching ash with my thumb. I must nurse the tame flame to consume the margins, the blanks. The air wobbles. I must watch the calcinated match head contort itself in blue heat, writhe, and bow: bow like a man.