Lately, they seemed to miss each other, sometimes by what seemed to Phyllis to be only seconds.
This time, Phyllis lingered longer than usual by the mailbox.
When Ms. Stevens still didn’t come, Phyllis sighed, raised the flag to indicate there was mail to pick up, and returned to her house.
It seemed a mere moment later when she glanced outside and saw that the flag was down again.
On Monday, Sarah Bodine read the note from her Great-Aunt Phyllis and started to cry. When her mother, Amy, took the note from Sarah’s shaking hands, she started to rage.
“I could kill her for doing that!” Amy told Sarah’s dad that evening.
“How bad was it this time, and how did Sarah get hold of it?”
“You read it, you’ll see how bad it is! Sarah read it because she got home before I did and picked up the mail before I could get to it first and throw the damned thing away.”
“Why does your aunt do things like that?”
“Because she’s a bitter, nasty old witch who doesn’t have a kind bone in her body! She called Sarah’s learning disability ‘so-called’—”
“What? My God—”
“Yes, and she said our stationery was too good for Sarah.” Amy’s face, tearful by now, twisted with bitterness. “According to Aunt Phyllis, dime-store paper is good enough for Sarah.” She blew her nose on the tissue her husband handed her. “Sarah and I picked out that stationery together, and we picked the best we could afford, because we agreed we wanted to show people how much we appreciate it when they give us presents.”
“If there is such a thing as karma...” her husband said, letting the implication linger. His wife took up his sentence and finished it for him, “...then my Aunt Phyllis is going to die of a thousand paper cuts!”
He almost laughed at that, because it sounded so silly, but then he looked over at a photo of their ten-year-old daughter, thought of how hard reading was for her, how she struggled with spelling words and composing paragraphs, and a rage to equal his wife’s came over him.
“She was a teacher!” Hal Bodine was indignant. “For how many years?”
“A hundred and fifty,” Amy said with a half-sob, half-laugh.
“Would you mind if I had a word with dear Aunt Phyllis?” he asked, his tone dripping cold contempt for the woman.
“No!” Amy exclaimed, and then she said gratefully, “I wouldn’t mind at all. Somebody needs to say something.”
Sybil Carson opened the creamy envelope with some trepidation.
Fan mail was such a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it could lift her spirits on a bad writing day. It could propel her back to her writing feeling as if she had magic in her fingers. Mail like that made her feel blessed and grateful to get to do what she did for a living, however small that living was these days. But it could also plunge her into black despair on days like today. She was already teetering on the edge of giving up on her latest novel, even though she couldn’t afford to give up. One more hard knock might bowl her over. It wasn’t as if she could easily find another line of work. For one thing, she wasn’t young, and for another she didn’t have any other skills. She’d been writing novels for thirty years, always thinking the next one would make enough money to let her relax a little bit. So far, that hadn’t happened. People assumed writers were all rich, but she made just enough to barely hang on until she fulfilled her next book contract. And she wasn’t even doing that this time. This book had been due three months earlier, but the story just wouldn’t come. She had tried every writing trick she knew to fool herself into getting going again, and still nothing happened on the page that anybody would ever want to read. If she didn’t meet her deadlines, she didn’t get paid. If she didn’t get paid, neither did her bills...
Please, she thought as she slowly opened the pretty envelope, please be a nice note. I just can’t take any criticism right now. Nasty “fan” mail felt like a slap out of the blue, like a hand shoving out of the envelope or computer to strike her hard enough to leave marks on her psyche, if not on her face.
Sybil pulled the notepaper out and unfolded it.
Maybe I shouldn’t read any fan mail right now, she thought, before looking down at the words. Maybe I shouldn’t take the chance of letting it demoralize me. But then she chided herself, Don’t be a baby. Sticks and stones...
Sybil read it clear through, and then laid it gently down in her lap.
Words can never hurt me?
What an abominable lie that was and always had been.
Maybe, she thought, as a sob rose in her throat, I should write a novel about killing one of my readers...
