The Letterbox

"I'd like a fire pit."

Annis dipped her face as she made her sole request of the innkeeper. Limp ringlets fell forward and veiled the faint hairs across her cheeks—get them shaved, you look like a man—but Annis caught the innkeeper's wrinkled nose and puckered face. Her paced and simple words, rehearsed at least three times before entering through the woven ropes over the doorway, had yet again failed to make her likable.

You're too smart for people to like you.

Annis kneaded a knot in her chest. Of course. She had forgotten the basics of a proper request: "Please."

The innkeeper rattled an emphysemic sigh. "Can ya pay?"

Annis fished out her coin pouch, swollen with weeks of allowance scavenged from the corners of her room, and laid out two silver coins. The old innkeep stared, a buzz—surprise, perhaps, at a teenager with such savings—humming behind the successive chews of her lip. Then with a loud smack, she clawed the coins off the table and swapped them for a tagged set of keys. "Ring if y'need anything."

Annis nodded her thanks, shouldered her sagging pack, and stole into the inn's open-air corridor. Crisp saltwater drafts rippled the hems of her frock, each billow rising with the sough and pull of the waves. Midday saw the first break of sunlight through the morning's gray clouds; Annis had ducked into the refuge of Maidenwatch Inn just in time.

Her keys opened a room, modest and warm, on a corner of the ground floor. Lamps glowed against the coppery tones of the walls and winked off the burnished contours of a cold censer. Sheer curtains floated with the breeze and trailed against a woven red rug, each shift of the drapery forming the shapes of wind and sea.

Annis, eyes riveted on the curtains, crossed the room. Her pack slumped off her shoulder and landed with a dull 'clunk.' Neither private bath or fresh bed distracted her as she eased out of her boots and stepped onto the veranda. Gritty sand on smooth stone met her bare feet at the same time the sea breeze wrapped around her. Blinking back sunlight, she rounded the fire pit, a brick basin prepared with fresh logs, and crawled onto a wicker recliner. She crossed knobby ankles under the tent of her frock and pressed her forehead against her knees, transforming into a rock awaiting the pull of the tide.

Another sigh swathed against the cliff. Gooseflesh rose on Annis's russet arms as chilled tremors racked her body.

By the time Annis unwound herself, the sun had set into daubs of light as seabirds squawked the evening. She fetched flint and tinder, sniffled, and rubbed warmth back into her bumpy arms as she worked sparks across the firewood. A bath would help, she thought, but settled for a thick towel around her shoulders. Not an ounce of willpower stirred her into warming her bath. Neither did she want to dirty her blankets. The world was kinder when left as little trace of herself as possible.

She did, however, drag her pack to her seat. Its weight bumped against her leg the entire way.

From the pack came a small chest about the size of an accessory case. Annis pried the tarnished latch open, flakes of metal sticking to her thumb as the chest creaked open. Firelight cast shadows over the stack of envelopes inside, bundled together with fibrous, kinked twine.

She recognized the first sheaf of stationery, wrinkled and stained from the morning's spilled cup of tea and milk. 'Dear Anni,' said the letter through the hardened stain, 'remember to make a plan. Just in case.'

Then the letter continued on as she wrote to herself, as she had for over ten years, of the sights she planned to see. The great trade caravans spanning the length of the desert. The capital draped and streaming in all the royal colors. The oases' dewy air perfumed by fruit and nectar. And the sea, the darling sea at first light as seen by the legendary Maiden watching from the cliffs. Annis's calligraphy drew the currents of her excitement—'the Maiden wasn't waiting for someone to come home'—the ink bold with her confidence—'she was watching for the world to open before her!'—until it blotted, frozen mid-sentence, the unwritten objection clear in her memory:

You have no common sense. How do you expect to get anywhere like that?

Some people had a sticky way of inhabiting thoughts forever. Neither crying, screaming, or throwing books and pots ever loosened their bind.

Which was why Annis folded up her letter, pressed her nails down the creases one last time, and tossed it into the fire. A swell and crackle devoured the paper in an instant, the belched spark digging a pit into her chest. One folded letter after another, white, yellow, textured, smooth, piled into the fire. Weeks, months, and years of dreams and musings burned away.

The pit in Annis's chest dug deeper.

She had started this immolation ritual at her mother's fireplace one weekend, but stopped when an embrace squeezed her close. "Your father loves you," her mother said between tears, "regardless of our split." Annis had choked her laughter—too loud, too much teeth, too much gums, too unladylike.

The stack in the box dwindled, leaving uniform envelopes, brown, thick like vellum. She used to find these envelopes under her pillow every year, though Father always forgot what birthday year he claimed to celebrate.

Annis pulled one note free. For my lovely daughter. No matter how many years it's been, I still remember cradling you as a baby in my arms. In many ways, you're still that baby, yet in so many others, you've become a woman I'm proud to call my daughter.

She skimmed the I love you at the end, because the suspicion that gnawed her at fourteen still chewed on her marrow at seventeen.

"Are you?" A knot in her throat tugged her stinging eyes and flaring ears, but Annis remembered what the baby not-woman—because the girl in between was not allowed to be seen—had been taught. Crying solves nothing. She palmed her eyeballs, yet hands could never contain a flood, and a throat could swallow only so much loneliness before the current dragged her under. Annis hunched over in the recliner and allowed herself one strangled sob.

Just one.

She hammered envelope after envelope into the flames, her cries shrill, guttural. Greedy flames howled higher with each offering of fury until at last, Annis laid fingers over an empty envelope at the bottom of the box. Heat seared tears and snot and spittle against her skin, but icy chills snaked up from her fingertips.

Over ten years ago, a daycare friend told her of a letter they wrote to their parents to "please stop fighting." That they liked home better when Mama and Pa smiled and played and ate dinner together. The letter, they said, got them hugs and apologies and a trip to the wharf.

Annis, with dreams of family saviorhood and otter-watching off the bay, wrote the same letter and slipped it under her father's shut door.

He called her in the next day. You have no business in this. And ripped it into eighths.

Remembering gutted her, the symptoms familiar. Heavy head. Hatched shadows at the edges of her watery vision. Each cold rush of breath down her lungs panged against her tight ribcage. That's what you get. 'But I don't deserve this.' Each collision of those voices sent deafening bangs behind her ears. 'I'm sorry. I'm stupid. I'm a mistake.'

But her sorries were never enough. What more could a child pay?

The empty envelope drifted into the fire. The kinked twine in Annis's box slid into a corner.

The next time Annis blinked, eyelids sticky over wooden eyeballs, dawn had cast its pale hues over the starry horizon. Only ash remained in the fire pit, its final, satisfied embers quenched by the chill of the sea. She unknotted herself, a tangle of stiff knees and frozen skin, and knelt by the brick basin. What flake formed what letter or envelope, Annis could no longer tell.

She brought both hands forward and cupped them in the ash. Silt drifted between her palms as she turned to her box. One handful. Two handfuls. Memories and hurt and longing rendered as insignificant as the particulates cascading into the box. Annis held her breath. She would forgive the sea breeze for taking a few granules, but not herself.

Only her streaking handprints were left in the pit. Before the wind could take any more, she shut the box with a whitened hand and wedged the squeaking latch down. The weight of the box cradled in her arms tugged at the edges of a cauterized hole in her soul.

This weight had to go.

Annis staggered to her feet against a doubtful bluster. On weak and raw footsteps, she padded to the banister of her veranda and gazed down at the sea—an ever-open maw—roaring against the cliffs.

She stepped back. Squeezed the box close one last time. Shuffled forward and pitched her arms.

The box careened over the banister, over the edge of the cliff. Ashes trailed in an arc and dissipated like mist as the lid flew open, falling, falling, until the box disappeared into the froth. The sea gave no acknowledgment of Annis's offering, the crack of smashed wood a lost beat among the waves.

A trail of sunlight shimmered afire in the box's wake, a pyre on the marine for a daughter ever dead to her father's love.