Carmen Speaks.

I had a box of stationary in the top drawer of my night stand, and I found a pen I’d been using to underline verses. The letter wasn’t anything close to logical. I’d written better papers in seventh grade. My mind was too jumpy to make sense. It ended up being a list, like the ones your grandmother taped to the refrigerator door. If I wasn’t on her schedule, well, God wasn’t on mine. I didn’t care what kind of response I got, as long as I got one. I used to have that list, but lost it during our move to Bluebird; still I remember every word. 

1. Why is this happening now? (Now was heavily underlined.) I’m a widow with three kids.

• Why is this happening at all? Insanity doesn’t run in our family.

• Samy and I might not have been your biggest givers, but we gave what we could, and I really, really wanted a Soft Heat Electric Blanket one Christmas, but the money went to the Indians. Why am I bringing this up? Because I think you’re being pretty short on reciprocity right now. 

• Are you there at all?

• I remained a virgin when I didn’t want to. 

• What’s going to happen to my kids?

• The bathtub faucets have started to leak.

• Where is this voice coming from? The devil? 

• People are starting to talk about me. No, it’s not my imagination.

1. If this is temporary, send some temporary relief.

   Sincerely,  

      Carmen Amber Rhodes, once your child but of uncertain standing now.

       P.S. I want number ten answered first. I mean it.

I fell asleep after writing that letter, which I left lying face upwards on the night stand so the Spirit wouldn’t have to slither under and read upside-down. I woke up early, excited as a child over Christmas, and the first thing I did was pick up the letter. It felt unread. I crumpled it up and threw it under my bed.          

  I had three more weeks of torment before I got relief, but during those weeks, I tried even harder. I was still working with the Junior Woman’s Club and we were re-doing the entrance to the Historic Covered Bridge, built before the Civil War, that even West Virginia, as short sighted as it is about landmarks, knew to preserve. You probably know just where I was working — the entrance which faces Short Street leading into town. The back section of the bridge had been closed earlier in the year because, even though some of the planks had fallen into the river below, cars were still using it. Sylvia Hudgins, president of our club, had called the president of the State Historical Society and reported the problem, so an ordinance had been passed and printed in The Mill Record that Bridge Street was now closed and those living on Bridge Street should make a U turn at the bottom of the hill and take the turn into West Mud on the lower end of town. Large red signs had been placed on either side of it saying DEAD END and yellow tape blocked off both entrances, but people ignored the signs and drove their cars through the tape. That’s why, by the time we were working on the entrance, state road workers had put up a low concrete wall blocking the exit from Bridge Street. The Junior Woman’s Club wasn’t going to decorate that, but the side the public would see was a different matter.