The Described Letter

A woman came to the letter-writer who kept his stall at the edge of the market. She sat across from him and said she needed to write to her sister, from whom she had been separated by a silence of eleven years.

The letter-writer dipped his brush. "What do you want to say?"

She began to speak. She spoke of the morning they had quarreled. She spoke of what she had meant to say and what she had said instead. She spoke of her sister's voice, the shape of her hands, the smell of the house they had grown up in. She spoke for a long time, and the letter-writer listened, and the light moved across the stall, and when she finished she felt lighter than she had felt in years.

She stood to leave.

"Shall I write it?" the letter-writer asked.

She paused. "I have said it," she said.

She walked home through the market, past the bread and the copper goods and the smell of fresh-cut wood, and she felt the relief of someone who has done something difficult. She felt it completely.

Years passed. Her sister moved to a village across the mountain. Seasons turned. Then word came that her sister had died in the first hard frost of autumn.

The woman sat for a long time in her house. She was not weeping for the silence that had lasted eleven years. She was weeping for the morning at the letter-writer's stall. She had gone there to close the distance, and she had closed it only in her own chest. She had given herself the feeling of having sent the letter without the letter ever leaving her hands.

She had spoken every word. She had kept every word.

The letter-writer did not remember her. He wrote many letters. He remembered only the ones that were sent.