Letter from V to O

Oslo,

Hello. How are you? How do you do.

I am Valerie, mother to Evelyn, who you know to be your daughter-in-law and who I know to be one of my female daughters. I have received a request from Phillip, who you know to be your son and who I know to be my son-in-law. He believes that a relationship between us would be beneficial. Why he is making this suggestion now, after our children's’ twenty four years of marriage, is strange to me. But he has always been the spontaneously strange sort -- one would have to be, to marry my daughter.

Unless there is some clearer reason. Over my seventy-three years of forced communication with similar animals, I have come to realize that this sort of thing is only done when there has been a wobble, something dead in a habitat, a layer missing or destroyed. An inconvenient change. I expect you have had a recent shift, or tragedy. Too bad really, how time insists on passing, and with it -- the world we were once so used to.

So, here I am writing to a stranger -- one mossy boulder to another, crooning through space as if in song. I suppose I should end in a question to provoke an answer.

Where’s the shithole of a purgatory home they have you living?

Sincerely,

V.

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