Jessica spent her evenings drinking flavored whiskey and smoking expensive pipe tobacco, toying with her guitar and watching Top Model on the internet. Her cat, Alistair, was on the other end of the couch pretending to sleep. This was Jessica's life, a pleasant exchange between her mindless and meticulous day job and her mindless and relaxing evenings, both conducive to Jessica's affinity for wandering thoughts.
During the day, Jessica sorted letters at the downtown post office. It was quiet, simple work. She was a connoisseur of penmanship, cherishing the seldom hand addressed letters in a fluttering archeology of correspondence. She passed the day pondering while her hands mechanically sorted mail until the clock sent her home, home to her sedate and nearly monastic existence among her books and her music and her cat and her occasional Top Model indulgences.
This evening her room was amniotic and all encapsulating. It was becoming too much. She paused the show and got up to open the window, let some fresh air in. It had been snowing all night and the white down toppled into the small den. In the dark moonless night she heard a bus roar by dimly a few blocks away. The trailing silence the bus had torn behind it made Jessica feel small, abandoned to the idle hands of a winter night's perfection.
She went back to the couch and closed her laptop. She sat down and began to muse, pulling lightly on the smoke and letting it drift away with her thoughts. In as much as the pungent tobacco lilted her into the past, the pungent secret of her old habit, a demon she had trumped over a year ago now, drifted into her consciousness. She immediately forced it out but it returned, faithfully. It was the call-note of highest and most desperate temptation. She began to avert her eyes. She opened the laptop back up and tried to pay attention to the noxious modelling show. Her eyes strayed. She knew the spot and the spot knew her. She knew the texture of the cigar box, the cigar box in a hollowed book. A cigar box in a hollow book inserted anonymously into a complex pile. In a complex pile of books supporting her record player and tape recorder, annexed to the drafty corner of the den where Alistair didn't hang out around. It was over there, humming her muffled tune to her.
Jessica closed the laptop once more and gazed pensively towards the drafty corner.

It had started with a post card- an irresistible depiction of Prague. Oh, if not for her penchant for Kafka she might not have slipped it into her bag. It was a day like any other, repetitive and amiably hollow. But then came this post card. The note on the back was a bunch of cordial double talk. This blather cannot exceed my love of Prague, she reasoned. She slipped it away with a most amateur slight of hand. The post card went on to live taped to the treasured wall space above her pillow. She would stare up at it before bed after reading a Kafka short, a dark and strange routine she use to keep before sleeping.
Months later, without incident, a fat hearty letter passed through her hands. The return address read Prague in a stern, unforgiving cursive. The stamp was beautiful and high minded. She trembled with curiosity. It was a well packed letter with pages that curved instead of creased with the virtue of their multitude. The letter itself had the transcendent smell of ink and well traveled paper. She looked up and around and back at her hands where her heart was throbbing. She convinced herself that the destination's postal code was difficult to decipher. She felt the eyes of her future and past selves searing with scrutiny, burrowing into the back of her neck. She would have liked to convince herself that the destination was her own home but she was not that silly. When lunch began she slipped by her station with her paper bag lunch and spirited the letter in with her quesadillas and apple juice.
As the day burned down like a wick, she felt the letter burning through the paper bag and through her conscience. She went home sick a couple hours early and in a way she really was quite ill. She was pale and sick to the stomach. But when she finally arrived home her resolve was concrete and her illness had been replaced with a sanguine anticipation.
She tore into the letter and discovered the day to day doings of a father catching up with his son, penned in a steady, careful English, thankfully. The father undulated between talk of memories, talk of his current affairs, and cautious and loving exhortations. He spoke of retirement and growing old and growing bored with everything. Of course the brief recollection of the father's memories are what most intrigued Jessica. Mention of unfamiliar names came with them their references and the delicate task of weighing the father's tone, choice of words, and trying to measure the old man's disposition to each person and compare that to his disposition towards everything else. The letter became for her a higher more refined sort of literature wherein she became a detective and an inventor and the intended recipient all at once. The back story was subjected to her conjectures and its accuracy was decided upon by her own intense investigation of the prose. Until she felt that her efforts to retrieve the truth were replete and exhausted she would not feel settled about the conjecture, which, in essence, was as good as the truth could have ever been in this unreal reality.
And from then on, letters became Jessica's favorite books. They were short, concise masterpieces, wrought with simplicity, swimming with possibility. No novel could prove so subtle. No episode of Top Model could prove so absurd. Their letters, those undeserving plebeians with whom the letters were intended, were being given a new life. They gave way to her conjectures, a beautiful and delicate balance of truth and imagination, something much higher and holier than any one of the letters' mundane prior destinies could have ever afforded them.
She took a new letter from work every week. She perfected her candour and refined her slight of hand. Jessica could seize letters with a practiced nonchalance, absent of all guilt or morality. When the habit had begun she would repeat mantra's of wholesome ideals to quench her quivering conscience: "This is a new art," she thought, incredulously. "Any one who understands art understands these trespasses. The author's themselves would appreciate the careful critical intrusion I make into their lives through these correspondences of theirs. I am like a fascinated surgeon crafting a new truth from an old one. The original recipient would not care to read their letters more than once. I, however, I truly treasure their reality."
This went on for months. Jessica became a shut-in, not answering her phone, not doing her laundry. Each night, she raced home from work to return to her true duty, 'the conjecture'. She skipped meals again and again. Her co-workers wondered at her health; she was growing so thin. She developed deep puffy bags under her tired-red eye balls. But Jessica's heart was full of joy and wonder. Her mind reeled over her characters- characters who actually existed, whom she might see on the bus to and from work.
Jessica would stare at people on the bus imagining them as the uninformed recipients of her hoodwinked letters. She had gone so far as to ask perfect strangers, with her heart beating so quickly, if their names were So and So and if they had an Uncle This or That or perhaps an aunt from London or a friend abroad.

Alistair sat heavily on Jessica's lap and began to purr. Jessica put a hand on Alistair's neck but didn't move it to pet him. It perched there, cold and catatonic. She could remember every stroke of the very last letter. She could remember the very moment it entered her hands, so sharp and light and clean with all it's fluttering innocence. The recipient was one Janet Algiers and the sender, in a very deliberate and baited cursive, Henry Patrick.

The envelope was lighter than a feather. The razor sharp corners seemed to challenge Jessica's placid morality with their rigid resolve. She found herself hesitating. The renewed vigor this letter provoked in Jessica with its almost spiritual foreboding was altogether irresistible. She casually dropped it into her open bag below the table and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to calm her heart, thinking she ought to put it back into circulation, looking for a better replacement. She hadn't had such moral issues bother her since the first couple letters. It was this same sense of foreboding that made her want to replace the letter but likewise would not allow her the strength. The sheer excitement was too much to restrain.
When she arrived home from work that day she took the letter out and put it on the dining table, apart from everything else, left to stare at the ceiling like a newborn. She sat down on the other side of the room and lit her pipe, leaving the letter to steep- or ferment rather, like they do with prisoners on death row. There was an anxious spirit in the room, waiting for permission to leave, a drunken poltergeist that was nudging Jessica, whining and complaining. Jessica was well aware of the post box right across the street. "I could take the damn thing and send it right back if it's going to put up such a fuss," Jessica threatened.

Jessica stood up and began to pace the room, much the same way she had paced that night she brought that letter home. Alistair had brushed around her legs and waltzed over to his dish, hinting. She filled the dish right full and put new water in the tea cup next to it. She could sense the letter. It was beginning to rattle the ceiling fixtures, disturb the pictures on the wall, undulate the tapestry. Jessica poured some southern comfort in a coffee mug and began pacing once more, puffing on her pipe like a thoughtless prayer. This same ritual had taken place the evening of that fateful day.

Jessica drank and smoked and stared down the letter until she went to sleep on the couch, dizzy and confused.
She woke up in the dark of morning, long before usual. She felt ill. Her stomach was upset and her head pounded. The letter lay untouched on the dining table. She picked it up and tore it open. There was a solitary leaf of slick creamy paper inside. She dropped the envelope back on the table and carried the letter over to the window. As she stared at the folded ghost of paper she felt the thing staring back at her, trying to recognize the true recipient in Jessica's larcenist face. Janet Algiers, Jessica thought. Janet Algiers. And Henry Patrick. Janet Algiers and Henry Patrick. She felt like a fraud.
She unfolded the letter and began to read.

Dear Janet,


I am sorry. I was wrong. Return to me. This will be my only petition. Let God sort out the rest. I love you.


Yours in perpetuity,
Henry Patrick.


Jessica put the letter back on the table and sat down heavily. She stared at the labyrinthine skin on her knuckles. She felt as though she was less than she used to be. She saw herself in the mirror on the wall. She was inchoate and pale, trying to cope with the magnitude of her infraction. Jessica's heart thumped slower and slower with these heavy echoing thuds that she wouldn't forget.
Her hands were lifeless as she dialed for a taxi. Replacing the letter in the envelope she slipped it into the breast pocket of her old coat and slipped her boots on. She stood outside in the silence of the dark early morning, waiting for the crunching tires to mess up the new snow.
She read the address to the driver from off the torn envelope. When they arrived there, Jessica climbed out and told the cab to wait for her. She stood at the foot of the sidewalk and stared stoically at the innocent stucco house. One by one, each possible conjecture began to light upon her like winks from God. Her mind began to careen, piecing together the back story of Henry and Janet. Then her mind began piecing together all the possibilities of her actions. If she put this letter in Janet's mail box, 'they lived happily ever after'. If she didn't, Romeo and Juliet, love lost to poor communication. Jessica had truly become the narrator. She asked herself what kind of narrator she was going to be. She couldn't let the story end like this.
With firm resolve she reeled around on her heels and got back in the cab.
Inside the warm emptiness of her home she collected all the letters together, even that first post card, and placed them tightly in a cigar box. She hollowed out a large volume of the collected works of Kafka and placed the box inside. It had gone unopened since.

Jessica went to the pile of books and took the record player off from the top. Hesitating for a moment, she began to rub her eyes violently, but she collected herself and unpiled the stubborn stack of hardcovers. She found the Kafka recoiling in terror on the backside of the pile, hiding its face from her. She cracked it open like a tomb and fished the letters out. They watched her gawk back at them like a bunch of dissected frogs. She went to the kitchen and returned with a roll of scotch tape. As she pieced them up and piled them neatly she began to softly cry. She found twine in the junk drawer and wrapped them all up together. Putting on her jacket and shoes, she pattered into the night and across the street to the post box. She pulled the box open with the tense funereal movements of ceremony, laying the bundle sweetly in the oven red warmth of its postal mouth. She took a last look and let go of the lid, allowing the deep cold gong of the closing metal to resound through her hypnotic trance.
Jessica turned around and stared at her home, to which personal letters were never addressed. Jessica could see Janet Algiers and Henry Patrick cuddling in the aftermath of so much melodrama. Her sobbing stopped. Her face was turning red in the cold stillness of the night. She could feel all her muscles pulling in, fighting for warmth.
With her hands jammed into her pockets she trudged back in. She went to the kitchen drawer and took out a bottle of lighter fluid and an old zippo.
The door closed soundly behind her with nothing in the air to echo against. She crossed the road and opened the post box, letting the lighter fluid sputter down it's deep red throat. The quivering smell was of equal depth and seemed to quench her chapped lungs just as it quenched the post box's. She knocked the hollow plastic bottle empty on the lip of the box and dumped the bottle in there with the rest of it. Jessica's grim frown was implacable. She struck the zippo and dropped it down the gullet, closing the lid quietly.
She went back inside quickly and sat by the window with Alistair, waiting for the sirens to drown out her malignant heart.



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