They told him he had the hands of an archivist which he thought was a poetic thing to say until he found out the person who had the job before him had torn most of the letters. He didn't know if there were any other requirements for the job or if he met them but they hired him and so now he had a thing to say when he was at parties.

There was drama in the work and that he liked. His space was behind a mahogany panel in the gift shop. He'd step through, put down his bag and coat, remove anything extraneous like a watch that could catch against an envelope or a belt that could brush against a stray paper when he stood up, and then he'd put on a fresh pair of white gloves and push aside a deep red velvet curtain to get to the shelves. It was quiet in there and cool. The only heat came from him and the thin aluminium laptop on which he typed.

He removed a letter, the next one in the stack, and transcribed. In the time between the 32nd letter in box 3a and the 33rd one he'd just removed from the same box, he'd dreamt of his dog. She had walked into a room with a Persian carpet and lain down, resurrected but so thin that her skin was shiny where it wrapped around her ribs. She hadn't been like that in life. He soothed her and pet her and thanked her for coming because he knew that it must have taken great effort for her to visit him from the dead.

So far his father hadn't made the trip. It was something he thought about while reading the words of the handwritten letters and turning them into Times New Roman. His father's last words had been the same as all his others: deliberately inconsequential, impersonal, sans serif.

It was a shame, really, what he did. The letters lost so much in the transition. The paper chosen, the color of ink, the slant or straightness of 26 symbols of speech and he flattened their meaning. He would read them on the screen after he was done and it was like a bad overdub of a show that stripped out the tone.

His dog got up after their visit and left with the politeness and dignity she had conveyed in her 15 years. He knew her in his bones and so she was able to live there in his mind. He remembered his father for who he was to him but not for who he was. Maybe that was why he was reluctant to show up, to make a journey that far only to be misinterpreted when he got there.

The therapist said he should express his grief in a letter. But his own feelings were unknown to him. Sometimes a sentence from one of the boxes sounded right and he thought about borrowing it but it wasn't his and so he put it back away.

.

Read her postcard.





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