Dear W.L.

I just swatted a yellowjacket out of mid-air with a copy of Proust's Swann's Way. The power of literature! The damn thing had been hectoring me for the last half hour. Buzzing right on the ridge of my ear, no less! He lay on the boards of the varnished deck, stunned, poor thing, the way I generally feel when I read Proust, and I knelt over him, his legs grabbing for the air, for life, for who knows what. Maybe just nerves firing. I pressed him gently but firmly into the wood with a quilted napkin until his carapace softly cracked. I am not a killer but enough is enough. We are all pestering someone. We all have a bulls-eye drawn on our most vital area. If you sit real still and keep quiet, you can feel it, like a spider on the back of our thigh we dare not swat for fear it will bite. Someone is taking aim at us. Someone in the clouds, in the bushes. The pull of his trigger finger is long and slow. It could take 80 years, could be in the next few seconds. In any event, it will all seem over in a flash. It'll all seem like a brief spell of fiction. We'll wonder how we suspended our disbelief so long.

So long!

Meeah




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Finalist for the 2020 Mythic Picnic Postcard Prize.

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