I’m Sorry About That Last Letter

by Luc Reid

I hope you never read that letter I sent before, but if you did I hope your hair grows back and that you get a new dog. It wasn’t the direst curse I could’ve picked, you’ve gotta see that. There’s all kinds of things out there. Anyway, I was just mad because you said all those things, and even if they were pretty true they were mean, and you’ve got no cause to be mean, but I guess I don’t either.

So this one’s a blessing, even though I know I can’t make up for what I’ve done and now there can’t be no chance at all we’ll get back together soon, except you know I still love you even after all both of us’ve done. OK, what I’ve done, I guess.

Now, here’s your blessing:

May your crops be fruitful (I know you don’t have any crops, but I was thinking of that spider plant you keep just barely failing to kill, and anyway this is part of the blessing so I can’t take it out), and may wealth make its way to you through secret means, and may your sight be clear (because maybe then you could get rid of those glasses, which make you look stuck-up anyway), and may you always be able to find the one you love.

That scent you smell is the dust I had to buy that goes with the blessing. Everyone out here swears by it, even though I know it smells like dung. It cost me nearly everything I had except the pickup, and you know that piece of crap’s gonna fall apart soon anyway. Anyway, it works great and it’s going to make sure you get all your blessings.

It was that last item I particularly liked, and I thought maybe sometime after your hair grows back and the blessing’s had a while to take hold you might want to find where I am and maybe come back to me. I hope you understand why I can’t tell you where I am right now, in case you’re mad.

And if all of this is a load of crap like you always said, then you probably have your hair and no harm done, in which case I’m staying with my cousin Jesse, whom you’ll remember from that party we had once when he tried to kiss you while he was drunk.

Love,

Dan

Day Street

by Susannah Mandel

(From The Knowledge: An A-To-Zed Of That City We Almost Know)

It will probably be dusk by the time you turn onto Day Street. The brick house-fronts will be darkening with approaching evening; between the chimney-stacks, the blue is draining out of the sky. The lawns are converging, with the brickwork and the trees, into a mass of indistinct purplish-gray. Out of that dusk, the legs of lawn furniture gleam fitfully; the white fences holding in the back yards; the curtains in the windows. The pavement, stretching before you down the street and trailing perpendicular paths up to the stoops, luminesces faintly under your feet like a phosphorescent wake.

The air is soft along Day Street. Past your ears float breezes, and the sound of voices talking; not out here, on the sidewalk empty except for one walker, but coming from somewhere very close, just over a white fence, just around the corner.

As you pass the house, a light comes on behind the translucent curtains. There is a movement of shadows in the window; a barely audible clatter of silver, a muted murmur of conversation. Up and down the street, just like in Magritte’s painting The Empire of Lights, the streetlamps are flickering on.

Above the roofline, the chimneys and the satellite dishes have been reduced to silhouettes. Above them, in a band of limpid blue, one bright star is coming out in the west. Very high up, a curve of light has pooled, like a rim of salt along the edge of the world.

A person could stand here for quite some time, looking at the streetlights, the sky. But it is possible that it may be time to lower your eyes, to move on down the street. It is possible that you have someplace you need to be.

The air you move through down Day Street is grey and gentle, cool and faint, suspended between the darkness and day. The pavement is an auroreal glow beneath your feet. In the darkened houses, all down the street, the lights are beginning to come on in the windows. The silver is starting to clink.

In the dew-laden grass, the flowers yawn. The wind is bright and silent: clear, cool, clean-smelling, as the air is just before dawn. Seeping upward from somewhere behind the houses, behind the one bright eastern star, the sky is beginning to turn blue. As you pass beneath them, following the pale line of the madrugal pavement, the long row of streetlamps, one by one, begin to flicker out.