Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best manga ereader .TXT) 📗

it, and each letter writer had carved their name around the edge of the table closest to their chair. Allegra. Laura. Ava. Ava had mentioned she was having a peculiar few years. Years lived out on this train with two people who wouldn’t let her talk to anybody but wrote letters alongside her? That sign must have said HELP and not HELLO after all; I’d been an idiot to take her word for it.

Beneath the first window of the carriage, the wall wedged inward and held two baskets with an engraved slot above each one. The OUT basket held a handful of envelopes, and the IN basket contained one envelope, addressed to the train itself, The Lucky Day.

“All these letters …” I looked over at the wooden trays. “They’re to the train?”

Xavier opened one of the drawers, labelled “Chaouen,” and took out an envelope. Dear Lucky Day, he read aloud, converting French into English as he read,

Everything is fucked, I don’t even know where to start with how fucked everything is. I saw you waiting here at the station, the Lucky Day, my lucky day, and I almost came in at your door so you could take me away. But I have to stay and see this through. That’s what’s best for everyone. Even though it isn’t me you’ve come for today, train, you can carry this along with you.

Thanks.

PS—Don’t write back. I’ve heard you do that sometimes, but you can’t try that with me. I know trains can’t write. Nor read, for that matter.

I opened a drawer labelled “Croydon” and read,

To Whom It May Concern, I am flabbergasted to see you flaunting the fruit of ill-gotten gains. Those of your generation may see the Lucky Day as a “cool hangout,” but I will forever be reminded of the Sichuan Affair that made paupers of tens of families and disgraced hundreds more, all so Hardeep and Shilpa Kapoor could walk away with their scavenged millions. Hope you crash and burn, and I don’t mean that metaphorically.

R. Pandey.

“… Does Ava basically have to stay onboard so she can’t be tracked to a fixed address?”

“I wonder,” Xavier said. “Quite a few of the letters reference this Sichuan Affair. There’s a subset that feels robbed every time they see this train. And their versions of the Affair are quite different. When you said we aren’t allowed to talk to Ava, I wondered if it was to protect her from employees of these lovely pen pals of hers. But if you think about it, the letters are just hot air. To post them you have to walk straight up to the train and push them through the slot. You could just as easily say all this to her face or give her a slap or whatever else is on your mind. That could backfire, though, and they just want a risk-free way of making her feel bad, so they sneak up to the train and post letters like this, presumably when there’s no one else around. So yeah, there are those letters, but most of the ones I saw made me laugh or go ‘awww’ or ‘OK, that’s very niche’ …”

I knew what he meant, having rifled through a few more drawers at random while he told me about them. “This one, for example, commending her choice of transport and trashing air, road, and sea transport. The sea is particularly lethal; perhaps it’s angry with mankind for wriggling out of the water all those aeons ago and choosing land. Now it’s all sharks and naval mines in there …”

“Still thinking about the Sichuan Affair,” Xavier said, picking up the envelopes in the OUT box and fanning them out across the desktop “What was the name of that ‘fruit of ill-gotten gains’ letter writer again?”

I went back to the Croydon tray: “R. Pandey.”

He flicked the corner of one envelope and dropped the other four back into the OUT box and reached for a letter opener.

“Want to see Ms. Kapoor’s reply?”

The sunglasses had slipped down the bridge of my nose; I pushed them back up. “It somehow feels like we’re in trouble anyway, so why not …”

Ava got stressed out when people maligned her train. She’d pressed down so hard with her pen that the paper had torn in places.

Hi R. Pandy!

Well, this is nice, my fortieth letter from you. I think it’s forty, but I’ve lost count, which you can’t blame me for, given that you use aliases. Sorry it’s taken so long to write back. Were those paint bombs little love letters from you too? Here I am, you’ve smoked me out at last.

Yes, Hardeep and Shilpa Kapoor were monstrosities, weren’t they! Number one morality tale for me and my cousins growing up. They’re every error we could possibly make conveniently packaged up in two bodies. Do you know how they died? One stumbled into the path of a horse-drawn carriage, and the other—you’ll like this, R. Pande—the other choked on emeralds. They left two sons behind. The eldest was fathered by Hardeep, and the younger son was a Caucasian-Indian mix. You can think Hardeep’s stumble was deliberate if you want, but I think he was so plastered he had no idea he was out in the middle of a main road. For months he’d been drinking the costliest imported liquor round the clock. A perpetual celebration; he’d had the privilege of being well and truly blackmailed. Not that the blackmailer would have seen what he did as anything special. It was a routine sequence, sweeping a smuggler’s wife off her feet, threatening said smuggler with public circulation of wifey’s love letters, and, even more pathetically, sealing the deal by promising to disappear from her life if furnished with all the vital names, dates, and places crucial to the smuggling routes. You don’t have to put in much effort to blackmail weaklings who don’t feel like they can live without their even weaker wives. You can lead the weakling around the teahouses