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by Erin Purcell

I pulled my candy cane striped fingers, red save for the bone white knuckles, into the sleeves of my bulky green coat. The crusty snot streaks still lingered on the sleeves from my cold the week before. The sky formed a canopy of hard grey cement on that Midwestern February morning; I chose instead to look at the cement under my feet as we walked along. I watched as the same divots and cracks passed under my eyes like a reel of movie film. This four-block stretch of sidewalk between my house and the school was more familiar to me than myself, less changing and more resilient. I knew that I could walk the whole way with my eyes shut because I’d tried it.

            Our Yale Avenue gang reached the mail box on the corner, a peculiar blue structure about my height that looked to me like a robot that had whizzed out the pages of a sci-fi comic book. I imagined it swallowing people’s letters and teleporting them off to its blue robot friends with a rush of colored lights and high-pitched beeps when we were all asleep in our beds. Katie, our neighbor from three houses down, rushed ahead of our gaggle, her jacket unzipped and her hair blowing into her eyes.

            “Hey guys! What if I put snow in the mailbox?” It wasn’t so much a question as a request for a dare. My sisters and I, raised with authority in mind and realizing that we were already risking tardiness, weren’t about to give it to her.

            “Why would you want to do that?” Stacy asked. “You’d ruin all the letters.”

            “Yeah, the snow would melt in there and the words would get all blurry,” Hillary added.

            “But it’d be funny! Think of all the grown-ups with their love letters in here for Valentine’s Day! All the love letters would be ruined!” Katie countered, the mischievous look in her eye already revealing how this would end. We tried to argue with her; what if the U.S. congressman from our town, who lived three suburban grid blocks back and a few to the left, had deposited in there some urgent letter to the president? Feeling savvy, we asked whether someone might be mailing a check. The possible risks fueled Katie even more. She scooped up a clump of grimy dirt-freckled snow with the mitten’s her grandmother had knitted at Christmastime and shoved it into the mailbox.

            “You shouldn’t have done that,” said Stacy half-heartedly as she turned toward the school. The other kids followed her, but I stayed behind on the corner. They didn’t bother calling back to me; they knew I knew the way and what the tardy bell sounded like.

            I didn’t care about the president or other people’s money. I did wonder, though, about the “love letters,” now being slowly digested by grassy slush in the belly of the robot. My experience with Valentines extended only to the little bits of folded cardboard with candy taped on that we obligingly dropped in every classmate’s decorated box come Valentine’s Day. My knowledge of love stopped at the boy meets girl, boy slays dragon, boy gets girl of storybooks.

            I thought about all the people I’d never met that might have their coins on the roulette table, who might have an envelope to a lover in that mailbox right now. I couldn’t picture their faces or what their eyes did when they kissed or fought, made love or peered anxiously over a jeweler’s counter at a display of rings. I didn’t know whether the sender liked Bob Dylan and whether that mattered to the receiver. I didn’t know why the writer always started the coffee pot too late and if that drove the reader crazy. Most of all I didn’t know why the lovers weren’t together right now, why they had to bother at all with inky words transported on fragile paper vessels. That the lovers had no more answers but many more questions than I did was not an idea that crossed my mind. I thought of the envelopes, stained now with water hopefully unlike tears, their letters turned fuzzy, soft, indecipherable.

            I pulled my balled fists into the sleeves of my coat as a shrill and urgent bell lost itself in the grey concrete clouds.