The Tuesday Garden
Hello Seth,
The computer showed me your letter, and I assume this means we have been matched as pen pals. What’s it like, living with another person? I mean, I’ve done it before, in another life, but the past is thinner than the present.
You say that the sun is trying to eat you. I crawled out the window into the Tuesday garden, where the sun was shining brightly, just this morning to see if I could tell if my sun was hungry. I stood for a long time with my eyes closed, every part of me floating up but my feet stuck on the earth, all my weight pinned against the soles, bare and cool in the crying grass, while the rest of me soaked up warmth like a sponge. But the sun did not eat me. My weight returned, and I sat and listened to a tree’s heartbeat for a while.
Maybe I don’t taste as good as you. If you are what you eat, I taste like cream of asparagus, and the ramen you get in tiny plastic cups that boil over in the microwave.
It’s also possible that the sun has it’s pick of tasty things here, or that something is eating the sun before it can eat me. There are lots of trees and flowers in the Tuesday garden, and they may be gobbling up the toothed rays before they can get to me. I’ll have to repeat the experiment in the blank garden, when it comes back. For safety’s sake I should perhaps not attempt it at sunset.
I do not believe anything too bad will happen to me if I try. The doors always come when things are going to go wrong, and this morning every door in the house was where it should be, including the ones that aren’t always there.
Since you mentioned rats, it occurs to me that since I came through the door, I haven’t seen another living thing that wasn’t a plant. Or fungus. There are no flies, or birds, or earthworms here, unless the earthworms can hear me coming and squirm their pink panty-hose bodies deep into the earth when I dig. At the house, if I go out a door, its mostly dirt and sand anyhow.
Earthworms are not native to North America. This is a fact that I found in the encyclopedia, which sometimes has an entry in a language I can read.
I understand missing your work. There is not much that requires doing, in this house, not in a way that will keep your head above the water and give you purpose. If there is dust, there is no one to see it but me, and the house does not seem to like it when I pry too much into all its secret corners.
Not that there are many of those. Like I said, it is a tidy house. There’s barely furniture, nothing but beige yellow wallpaper and the crater walls outside the windows.
No one is watching me. The vast emptiness presses hard on my shoulder blades, makes me creep along the baseboards like a mouse. I think it might be better, to have someone watching, sometimes. To consume the parts of you that otherwise might spin off into an endless void. Even if there’s no help for the fact that we’re all locked into our own skulls, drowning in words that dangle off the fluttering shapes of thoughts.
I’m afraid that, as a pen pal, I won’t be very useful for relationship advice.
Except - I hear you. Well, see your words on the computer screen, that is. We will proceed with the assumption that both of us are real. That the sun can be bottled up, and kept from eating you.
I volunteer my services in trying, at any rate. I’m something of a multi-lifetime expert in disappearance.
Anya
P.S. I don’t suppose you know anything about cooking, do you? My last two breakfasts were raw potatoes. It seems I lost anything I once knew about it in the jumble on my way through the door.
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Author's note: This second entry in the Pen Pal Project is a direct response to Seth's profile, which can be found here. Anya's profile is here.