Free Letters to Jenny by Piers Anthony

life. That was last month. Now she has come out of her coma and is able to squeeze someone’s hand on command and move her eyes, and she evidently understands what is said to her, but they don’t know yet whether she will ever recover completely. Her life will never be the same, regardless, I thought of you when I read about this, because though the circumstances of your injury were different, your situation is similar. I think you can understand how that woman is feeling. She is recovering faster than you, because (I think) she was hurt more in the body than the head, while you got bashed worse in the head. But none of it is any fun. I don’t expect you to feel any better because someone else got hurt, but if you are the kind who prays, you might pray for her. You know what she needs.
    Back to a nice item. Your mother sent me two of your pictures—no, don’t glare at her, she means well, honest she does, you just have to make allowance for mothers—of princesses—no, not the originals, she made copies, you don’t think she’d risk the originals, do you? So stifle that glare—uh, where were we? Somewhere in that sentence I got lost! Also your story about the blind princess. So now you get my critique. Stop that! Come back from under that sheet! You’re disturbing the Bed Monster! I told you this was a nice item, I think. Your spelling is like mine, which means you are a creative person. The only one in my family who could match my bad spelling was my dyslexic daughter Penny. Oh, I can spell now, of course; I learned it when I was an English teacher, and had to abandon my creativity. Sigh. I don’t know whether I’ll ever recover. But your pictures—what do you mean, what makes me think I’m an art critic? I took art classes for six years and once thought to be an artist, so there! Why didn’t I become an artist? Let’s change the subject. What? Look, we really don’t need to go into that. Oh, all
right
: I realized that I was not good enough to make it as a commercial artist. Now are you satisfied? I feel your pictures are marvelously mature, considering your age, and expressive. Maybe you’ll be able to do what I could not, and be an artist. But it’s something else that brought me to this paragraph. One of your pictures is of a woman with her baby, and she is crying. I’m not sure what the story is there, but I don’t think that’s the blind princess, unless maybe there’s a chapter I missed. But what I notice is her hair. It flows out and forms a kind of cape behind her, framing her upper body, I love that. I remember when—but no need to go into that.
    Oops, you say you want to go into that? Sigh. All right. When I was eleven years old, I knew a girl who was twelve. No, I’m not making this up. She was everything desirable in a woman, as I saw her, I loved her. No, no one took it seriously, and certainly she didn’t; what would this fine young woman want with a boy of eleven? But my mental picture of her remains to this day, and I think I still love her, over forty years later, in my way. I know it by the hair. Her hair was the length of that of the woman in your picture, and though it did not flare out like that—she wore it in two long braids, mostly—I like to think that maybe it could have, had she wanted it to. To this day the first thing I notice about a woman is her hair. Have you seen pictures of the singer Crystal Gayle? Right—she’s my favorite singer. Because of that hair. Oh, she sings well, very well, but I really didn’t notice her singing until I saw her hair. So when I see your picture, and that hair, oh Jenny, it touches me. Perhaps by no special coincidence, I have a lady goblin in
Isle
of View named Godiva, who has hair like that. And of course in a prior Xanth novel I had Rapunzel. Nada Naga, in
Heaven Cent
, has hair like that too, and younger Prince Dolph loves her. Now you know why.
    And an in-between item. I understand they have to give you nerve blocks, because you