The Correspondences

Two weeks. Seven letters. Five messages delivered.

Miriam kept a list — she was, above all things, a woman who kept lists — but the list had started to disagree with her. She was certain she'd received seven letters, but when she counted the envelopes in her desk drawer, there were eight. She counted again, touching each one with her index finger, moving them from the left side of the drawer to the right. Seven. She counted a third time, moving them back. Eight. The drawer was the same size it had always been, but the letters occupied it differently each time she looked, arranging themselves into arithmetical arguments she couldn't win.

She closed the drawer.

The house watched her count. She was sure of this now, though she would not have said it aloud and did not write it in any of her notes — not the clinical notes she kept in the locked cabinet, not the personal journal she kept in the nightstand, not the invisible record she maintained in the part of her mind where professional objectivity was stored like good silver, taken out only for occasions. The Victorian had always had a quality of attention — a room that seemed to hold its breath when she entered, a window that framed exactly the view she needed to see at exactly the moment she needed to see it — but this was different. The house was paying attention to the letters. It leaned toward them. The hallway from the front door to her office, a distance she'd measured once at fourteen feet when she was considering new carpet, now took sixteen steps. Then seventeen. Then she stopped measuring, because measuring meant acknowledging that the results were real.