Letters to Dead Authors, #8

Dear Mary Shelley,

Intermediate Death Studies. The students bend their heads over their compositions, fidgeting with their gags. Outside, the sun, a purplish stain in the haze, sinks behind dead trees. It is a dispiriting sight. I prefer the stainless black of night.

I have long contemned those spiritualistes who regard the Beyond with the same proprietary air that they would an heirloom sugar-dish, confident that their dear Departeds can be tempted away from exchanging platitudes with Ludwig van Beethoven and Pocahontas by the opportunity to festoon their descendants with ectoplasm. The dead have their own concerns. The grief or guilt of the living is not one of them.

Pray tell me then, how I should explain this scene? It is mid-afternoon; somewhere the students are doing tonsil lifts under the eye of Mme. Once. I am in conference with a visiting parent—a woman with a giant fleshy nose, pince-nez, and a look of dyspepsia—when the new girl, Finster, bangs into the office, gags, grabs her throat theatrically, and says in a low, sharp, unmistakeably male voice, “I thought I told you never to touch my spoons.” Mrs. Woodbridge lets out a shriek and collapses. When she comes to, she immediately writes a cheque for a full year’s tuition. I whisk away the cheque—and the child, who will receive an extra biscuit at supper—before she can change her mind. “It was he! It was my dear father!” Mrs. Woodbridge kept saying. But it was not her father. How do I know?

Because it was mine.

Mrs. Shelley, well do I know how expectation can deceive, moulding alien sounds and sights into the figments of a domestic idyll. But I neither wished nor expected to hear my father’s voice. Now I am anadiplosis is the repeti—

Excuse me, little Upshaw posed me a question, and I lost my thread. I do not have the spirit to continue tonight. Perhaps I will pick up my pen again tomorrow.

(Next day, early:)

Perhaps I was mistaken, about my father. But I am rarely mistaken about the dead. But perhaps I was. Perhaps there are other fathers with a penchant for spoons and savagery. Perhaps nothing is more common. In any case I have heard nothing more from him. But I should not have taken up my pen, the eastern horizon is stained with pink. Dawn approaches; how I hate it. The sky peels up, bleeding, to admit another nasty day. I will to bed.

Vehemently,

Your Friend (as I hope),

Sybil Joines