A Letter from the Fictional Character, Geneva, to her Author, Myfanwy Collins

Engine Books, March, 2012, $14.95

Dear Myfanwy Collins,

I want to thank you for telling my story, and the story of the others too, especially the women. I’m glad you didn’t just write down all the terrible. That you saw more than the bad that we done and the ugly that we made. I never imagined our story would make its way to strangers. Never believed our missing parts and empty spaces could fill anything, least of all the pages of a book.

I sure as hunger never knew so much brutal could be turned into this strange kind of beautiful, sort of like hearing the music in one person beating on another. I wish I’d done better. Not least because then you’d have a better story to tell. Or maybe it’s only our mistakes and sins and banged-up bits that are worth picking-over. I reckon we should all be made to see our insides, like a punishment that’s really a present where we take off the liar wrapping paper, open the stupid tissue, and pull from the box our wet, slippery, dark parts.

You helped me see inside the others too, every last one of them, and got down all our betrayals, how we wronged ourselves and each other over and over. You made me want to bring back the book’s dead and glue its damaged together again. Whatever about repairs, though, the dead are gone and the rest of us just have to get on. You also got me thinking about how we subtract and add to ourselves, and usually in the wrong ways. We have these lacks, then, and this haul, too, and we’re always in motion, struggling to get to the next place, or back to some previous place, and none of us seems to know just where it is we’re trying so hard to get to. While I read, though, I was still.

I also see in here who and what you allowed to be saved, and I thank you most for that.

Yours truly,

Geneva

*****

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