Free Landing by Emma Donoghue Page A

still have their Christmas lights hung along the eaves. I'm particularly proud of the icicle outside my bedroom window, which is almost as long as I am.
    Oh god, this was like some schoolgirl's essay on "A Winter Day."

    My mother's house is on Main Street, just two blocks from the crossroads. I keep trying to saying "my house," but it feels like one more tiny way of letting Mom disappear.
    Well, what was the point of writing to this stranger at all if Jude couldn't say what was on her mind? She pressed on.

    The museum is only another block away; how's that for a low-stress commute? Last summer when I busted up my knee playing street hockey with some ten-year-olds, I was able to hop to work. You know, this crossroads community (officialspeak for a one-horse town) really isn't so "hideously homogeneous." We've got flower-arrangers and fundamentalists, yeah—and last year someone did chalk RUG MUNCHER (i.e., me) on the door of the museum—but also a gay-run guesthouse, two Web-site designers, a day trader and a Buddhist. When you live in people's pockets you learn how out there some of them are. There's a guy in a rotting mansion just north of town who sets his Labrador on fallow deer and is rumoured to have an unnatural relationship with her. His wife left him a long time ago, or some say she's buried in the woods ... Uh-oh, on reflection that's going to confirm all your prejudices about rural creepiness, isn't it?

    It's true that if I want a strawberry-pear smoothie I've got to use my mother's Moulinex. Try again: MY Moulinex. No, cut that; it'll always feel like my mother's Moulinex. Síle, it just occurred to me that I envy you for losing your mother when you were too young to really know what was happening.
    Oh lord. This was more real, but—

    Sorry, that sounds cruel, and dumb. Of course it's better to have a mother when you're growing up—but right now I miss mine so much that all my bones hurt.
    The letter was taking a rapid nosedive.

    This letter is taking a rapid nosedive, but I guess there's no use pretending I'm fully compos mentis these days. That's another thing about handwritten letters, they're more honest. If I'd tried to scribble over the above, you'd have seen it, whereas e-mails let people edit their feelings.
    Maybe she should e-mail a revised version of this after all. She pulled viciously on one ear lobe. How hard could it be to answer a letter? Not too gushy, not too cool; not too ninety-year-old, not too seven. Somewhere in between "Dear Valued Customer" and "Dear Woman of My Dreams."
    That phrase stopped Jude short. She laid down the pen. She'd forgotten the dream till now; she couldn't even remember if she'd had it last night or a few nights ago. It was simple, and mortifying. Síle O'Shaughnessy reclining on a cloud, nude and brown as a figure by Gauguin, looking straight out, unashamed.
    Jude started scribbling the first lie she could think of.

    There's the phone, better go answer it.

    Till next time, Jude.

    P.S. I like your line about flying free like a kite—except that if you've ever flown a kite you may have noticed they have to be anchored firmly by the string or else they flop out of the sky?
    Well, the length of that P.S. blew her story about the phone ringing, but never mind. Jude would have liked to enclose something, a flower maybe, but there was nothing growing out there in the frozen mud. Instead, she searched the sideboard, and ended up dropping into the envelope a tiny inch-long feather from a Canada goose.

Virtually Nothing
Ah, but when the post knocks and
the letter comes
always the miracle seems repeated—
speech attempted.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF
Jacob's Room

    Re: Technology etc
    Hey Jude (as the Beatles put it), thanks for your astonishing ginger pumpkin loaf, I take back any aspersions I've ever cast on pumpkins. I love the old Hudson's Bay Company tin you sent it in, I'm going to store my bangles in it. To make this a mutually beneficial arrangement (forgot to tell you,