Dear Mrs. Carson,
Your novel, Love’s Mystery, came highly recommended to me by a person I had long considered to be a friend. After reading only the first chapter, I now know two things that I did not know before:
1. No one who would recommend any of your books to me could possibly know me very well. Apparently, she is not the friend I thought she was, a mistake for which I do not blame her, but only myself. You may rest assured that I have also written to her to tell her so.
2. Publishing standards have declined shockingly, which I pointed out in my letter to your publisher. It is clear that you have some talent, which makes it even sadder that you would waste it on such a tasteless story with such offensive language in it. I’m sure you do not use those words in your own life, so I cannot imagine why you would inflict them on your would-be readers.
I regret to tell you that I will never check out any of your other books from the library, nor can I in good conscience recommend them to my acquaintances.
Yours truly,
Proofread. Fold. Insert. Address. Seal. Stamp.
From the stack of offenses she had collected from the past week, Phyllis picked up the thickest pile. It was composed of several articles from the local newspaper, each article marked up with strong red ink — grammar, punctuation, and spelling corrected, questions of fact circled, composition corrected with examples of improved style. When necessary, beside the reporter’s byline she wrote in legible block letters, “AAH?” which stood for “Affirmative Action Hire?” She did not have to explain the acronym, or even pen an accompanying note for this mailing, because the editor, Marvin Frolich, could count on receiving a full packet from her every Monday. He was, by now, after several years, cognizant of her abbreviations. The source of this latest mailing would pose no mystery to him.
Phyllis sat back, satisfied with her morning’s labor.
Then she gathered the creamy white envelopes into a neat stack and marched them outside to her mailbox for her post woman, Diane Stevens, to pick up. Phyllis always tried to time her arrival at the box with Ms. Stevens’s arrival, so that she could let her know of any problems with previous deliveries, or remind the girl to tuck in her blue shirt or comb her hair. Yes, it was a hot job, and yes, it was no doubt difficult to keep one’s clothing tidy while carrying a heavy bag, but that was no excuse for arriving looking as if she had dressed in her truck. She was, after all, an official representative of the United States Postal Service and the residents along her route were her employers.
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...