Dear Wigleaf,

I collected two stamps while I was away. One in my passport and one of a local landscape. Here, we favor lighthouses, but there, it's a small painting of cliffs. No people to reflect scale but, I assure you, the cliffs are steep.

Perhaps there are people there, far below that opaque water. Maybe, out of frame, there's a tiny painted coastguard collecting bloated bodies. The composition wouldn't allow it, but it may well be that every envelope kissed with that stamp in its corner, carrying tidings of joy from one side of the island to the other, carries also tides of drunken carelessness, of misbegotten false immortality circling the drain of a coast that isn't a coast so much as the walled edge of a bathtoy in a basin so large, it houses its own gravitational pull.

It could be that the lighthouse was omitted for a reason. That which we cannot see—

When next we meet, try to look at it and not hear foghorns.

Thinking of you,

Carissa






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Read CH's story, "Girls without Fingers Want to Unbutton Your Fly."

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