Free Landing by Emma Donoghue

inquiry was ghastly, but I didn't actually lose my job.) Do you think about him much? I do, especially on night flights, when the lights are low and lots of passengers are asleep. He ran his own small plastics company, and he was flying to England for a trade show. No previous history of heart disease, but that's what did for him. The airline flew his eldest daughter over to collect his body and paid for the embalming. So now you know as much as I do.

    My hand is tired already, I'm going to have to stop before I've actually said much. I wonder how long this will take to get to you by mule, elk, or whatever the Mounties are using these days? I'm trying to picture your little hamlet of Ireland, Ontario, and I realize the images in my head are all out of Northern Exposure, which is actually Alaska, isn't it? Small-town life has always given me the creeps—no cinemas (I'm such a film slut I'd see two a day if I had the time) or music venues or juice bars when you need a strawberry-pear smoothie—the hideous homogeneity—how can you bear it?

    Shut up, Síle, you're being very rude ... Maybe it's just me, cities turn me on. I need to feel free as a kite—I happen to be based in Dublin but it could be anywhere really (well, anywhere with a population of more than a million!), life being a moveable feast, to use the old Catholic phrase. Kathleen (my girlfriend) disagrees, she says emigrants are always a bit pathetic.

    Outside the window on my street of skinny terraced houses I can see some valiant purple crocuses pushing up. (I don't know how to grow anything myself but my neighbour Deirdre and I have an MBA, she uses my windowsill as an overflow for her pots.) Clearly spring—my favourite season—is round the corner.

    Hmm, handwriting's kind of like Morse code, slow and serious. It's so much more tactile than print, I'll grant you that. Here's a smear for instance of the remains of my raspberry tart:

    Síle.
P.S. Happy Valentine's Day.

    Struggling to decipher the crazy handwriting, Jude's first impression of this letter was that it was indeed written to kill half an hour. And was that "Kathleen (my girlfriend)" as in friend or as in ... On the second reading, she paid more attention to the bits about waiting six weeks and a struggle of wills, and the pointed reference to Valentine's Day. It must have taken quite a while to copy by hand. She licked her finger and touched it to the brown smear at the bottom of the page, tasted it. Raspberry reawakened in her mouth, and she thought, What a flirt!
    She reread the letter twice more; she was too excited to eat lunch. She sat down at the kitchen table with her fountain pen and a not-too-yellowed page of Ireland Museum notepaper.

22 February

    Dear Sile,

    Got your letter just after I e-mailed—snap! Very good to hear from you.

    I know, snail mail takes a while, but just think: If our ancestors hadn't communicated with each other on something as lasting as paper, over the last thousand years or so, there wouldn't be much trace of them left.
    Jude was aiming for thoughtful, but it was coming out preachy. Time to switch topics.

    Yeah, I think about George L. Jackson, mostly when I cant get to sleep. Thanks for letting me know about him. Not that a handful of facts tell you much about who someone really was.
    Rachel Turner, née Dorridge, born Chichester, April 3, 1938. Arrived Toronto September 1957. Worked Ladies Apparel Department, Eaton's. Married—

    Stop it, Jude.

    I keep having to consult my dictionary. It explains "moveable feast," but when you say you and your neighbour have an MBA, I presume you're not talking about a shared Master's in Business Administration?

    If spring's around the corner in Big Ireland, you're clearly not just five hours ahead of me, but a whole season. Here in Ontario it's a shiny winter afternoon, and the sidewalks are covered in thigh-high jagged mounds of beige snow, so I prefer to walk on the street, which squeaks underfoot. Some houses