Free The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

listening to the guttering flames, aswim in the thick liquid air, the jazz music, the brawls in the streets.
    One evening they were passing through an alley when they saw a drunk man, narrow shouldered and buck toothed being questioned by a cop. It was the same man who’d drawn their portraits and Henry started to say something, but Mercy stopped him. The cop struck at the man’s hip pocket with a billy club to break the bottle he carried and whisky ran down the man’s pant leg. Again, Henry was to say something, but Mercy took his arm and urged him away. In that moment he understood how afraid she was of any encounter that might reveal them, her secrecy, her insistence upon locking the door.
    “The police. Stay away from them,” she said, and he knew enough to not ask why.
    Mercy began working on a book she was making and he would watch her gliding fingers as they scissored paper and taped and drew and painted. It was a large book with a hard black cover and sheets of thick paper and when she turned the pages they made great sweeping noises as if the paper still had memory of the wood it fell from. He listened to the scratch of her pencil and over her shoulder he could see drawings and paintings. There were faint letters, words, and numbers. She knew he was there and would let him look but not for so long before she would chase him away.
    He asked about one page and she told him she was writing a poem for every part of her body. On another page she said the image was nothing in particular but came from her mind and made little sense, but soon she would figure it out. The signs were as if a foreign language had been encoded by a nonspeaker, twice and thrice removed from understanding, and there were scribblings and washes and recipes, figures, fashion, algebraic calculations, and reminders of things to do.
    As the days passed Mercy began keeping more pages wholly unto herself and beyond his understanding. She would let Henry have glimpses and he would see a list of things to get at the market and be relieved but then another page without shape or form. She told him they were inside the book together and if she ever disappeared he would find her there, and then she shooed him away.

Chapter 12
    O NE DAY HE WENT out and when he came back Mercy was weeping. She held a letter in one hand and an envelope in the other. It was a moment that bordered on the frightful because she had been eating pistachio nuts and her fingers and her mouth and about her mouth were red with stain and so too her eyes where she had wiped at them.
    “Why would someone say these things to me?” she begged to know, her red fingers fluttering in the air as she spoke.
    He looked at the envelope and there was no name and the letter itself was addressed to no one in particular. She told him she was working and happened to look down and saw where it had been slipped under the door.
    He asked what it said and she read.
When I saw you, I knew I needed to tell you that I floated on that very same dinghy you’re on in that same vast ocean. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned firsthand about God. What he wants is to become more real to you than anything else in the world. His friendship will be like none you have ever known or will ever know again. He will talk to you just like a friend with skin would and your heart will know it is him talking. You will be astounded at the things he reveals about himself, others and about you. You will know it is his voice if it is full of love and encouragement, wisdom and humor. He does not speak King James English. The other angry condemning voices you hear are not his.
    “Who wrote it?” Henry asked.
    “The old woman with the glasses. I went to the balcony and saw her come out.”
    “She wants to save you.”
    “But I am not lost.”
    “No,” Henry said. “You are with me.”
    “Do you think she’s crazy?”
    “What are you getting at?”
    “Do you think she’ll do something?”
    “No.”
    “What about