Letters to Dead Authors, #14

Jane E.,

I have had a disappointment. The centerpiece of our Theatrical Spectacle was to be the release of the Sky Lung. It would have been a stirring sight, swimming up into the heavens like a whale—an unbeautiful one if truth be told, made of patched sheets dipped in melted galoshes and thus a dull, uneven, grayish black with hints of green, but still marvelous, especially if one reflected that it was full of the mingled voices of hundreds of dead souls! But it has become apparent that it will take weeks if not months of effort to fill it. So we have had to postpone that treat, and stuff the thing half filled into the old carriage house, where it surges and wallows like some inconceivable sea creature rippling through the submarine abysm. The children sneak in to wade across its buoyant swells, which fling them from side to side as if alive. They will put holes in it; I must install a lock—first I must install doors—that is rehang the doors, their hinges having rusted through—but I am so tired—no, not exactly that, but—

There is not much of me left, and what there is hurts. It feels as though I am trying to sand myself down from the inside. There are easier ways to remove oneself, as I ought to know.

At least I am dying beautifully, and in red. I pay myself out of myself in ropes that startle my linens.

To add to my grievances it will not stop raining.

Plink, plink, PLUNK. That is not rain. The information that someone is practicing the piano, no doubt in preparation for our Theatrical Spectacle, has tunneled up through the pipes, unerringly steering right or left at tee after wye in its zeal to arrive at my inhospitable ear.

It is perhaps strange that for all my devotion to the voice, I have a tin ear. I am not referring to my hearing trumpet.

I do not believe that reveals anything in particular about my character.

They say that I am cold, who take a woman’s temperature by her men. It is true that I have refused love, after a few ghastly stabs at it, and hoped thereby to lower my temperature to the absolute zero of death. But there are other passions.

I have no reason to doubt that I sucked a teat as ardently as anyone, for instance. When I was young enough still to be excused certain peculiarities in my manner of speaking, my parents were kinder, to each other and to me, and life seemed sweet. We were wealthy enough that I wanted for nothing that my father deemed suitable, but it was in communion with the natural world that I found real bliss. The whole world seemed to breathe then, groaning and hissing under my feet and in the trees over my head. Green life squiggled through veins in the earth, then fountained forth as weeds and trees. Bits of the world broke loose as bugs, squirrels, foxes ran to other places, then were reabsorbed; other bits lay quite still, but with a gleeful and provocative air, as if they had something to say and were daring me to guess what it was.

I took that dare.

They say that I am cold, but a charred stick can have a ruby core. And Eyjafjallajökull smolders in its dress of ice.

Eyjafjallajökull. Now that is what I call a word. I have dreams that in the vocabulary I spit up daily now will be the one word to end them all. A Blitz of meaning to give speculation its quietus. But wouldn’t such a word stick in my throat, not telling me what it is to die—but showing me?

Death is a word on the tip of my tongue. Mine the ear for whom alone it is meant. I will rest my hopes in the chance that causes do not infallibly precede effects, and die listening.

Yours affectionately,

Sybil