By Daniel Galef

First, I burned the two small sheafs together. It should have been a dramatic moment: the casting of love letters into the grate, the curling of the black leaves amidst the writhing serpent flames. But they weren’t even my letters. My hand, perhaps. But not my heart. Then I set about on the two on the writing table: the only ones I had left undestroyed.

~

There was no real need to copy the hand so precisely, but I always made the surplus effort. I considered it a labor of love. As always, the epistles were identical in all regards with the exception of the signature beneath and the address atop. But these two, at last, were the last two. As I released them into the vermillion herm of the postbox, I reviewed and reaffirmed my decision to not write out farewells, to not attempt composing heartfelt words on others’ behalf. To do so would not be right.

~

The two addresses had numbered once among some hundred or so, picked at random. The introductory letters were all the same, of course. With the post and the penny black, love need no more be fettered by the provincial bonds of country than it once did by a daub and wattle wall segregating the boudoir of Thisbe from Pyramus. I did not invent the pen pal—I did not need to. Just as I did not need to invent love. Did the author of the Jerusalem Letter first teach mankind to trust? To give? Thank the Almighty for such convenient virtues.

~

The idea, like all great ideas, was not original, but possessed an originality of application. My brother Alphonse, some summers before, had become a celebrated grandmaster of chess-by-post, playing simultaneously two games against two formidable opponents and thus garnering an enviable fifty-percent record of wins. His ruse was ultimately found out, but he had made the predictable errors: he had employed his own name, rather than a judicious nom-de-guerre, and he had made public certain boastful pronouncements of his prowess, which was as inviting destruction from the heavens directly.

~

As I lost interest in the countless other conversations, the last pair proved fruitful, as fruitful as any Edenic bough. It grew so prodigiously that I had to take off evenings to copy the lengthy gushings to pass on—(some of which made me blush)—and it blossomed into a romance to rival any among Hero’s, Abelard’s, or Sigismund’s, not least because it possessed of the minor virtue of being true…for a given value of truth. I had changed the letters as little as possible—most often, not at all. An occasional name, which of course had to be altered to protect all parties’ anonymity. Once, a passing reference to the numerological significance of the digits of my post office box, which both held firmly to be the other’s. But these grew less frequent as the relationship progressed and the topic of discourse more often soared to the poetical heights of enumerating each other’s unseen virtues and versifying said enumerations, as well as swearing to arrange the inevitable worldly congress as immediately as the conditions converged on the favorable.

~

Which best-laid arrangements, of course, I confused as often and as thoroughly as I could, and too the sort to engage in romance-by-post are not in the first place so free as that to take leave, but the time grew ever nearer when neither party would be satisfied with my letters, as well-copied as they were. And they were well-copied, in the round hand of a leisure-rich junior clerk. While no master forger, I learned the loops and swashes of my partners’ signatures in their unconscious menage-a-trois as intimately as I knew all other details of their souls, all aspects of which they revealed to none in the world except their beloved, who was me. And they knew nothing of me.

~

The fire by now had almost gone out. I stoked it to a final fitful hunger with the crowning addition of the last two letters, now quite unnecessary. In the transmutations borne of the blaze, they shrank and warped together, and at last were undifferentiated as a single gnarl of black ash, that presently disintegrated.

~

They never even knew each other’s names.