Mark Dunn - Ella Minnow Pea

NOLLOPTON

Tuesday, August 15

Dear Goodhusband Amos,

I write this on the chance that I may still be gone when you return. I will be at the market buying Cornish game hens for dinner tonight. I know how much you and Ella like them.

You think you are so smart! Now just whom do you think you’re fooling? In all the years we’ve been married you have not forgotten a single anniversary, and I do not think you intend to start with this one. I am thus quite aware, sir, that you are not in any form, shape, or manner having a work-related conversation with Anselm Taylor (who knows to call on you if he needs you) but are, instead, even as I write this, selecting for me some appropriately commemorative gift which you have absolutely no business buying, given the precariousness of our present financial situation.

You are too, too much, Amos Minnow Pea!

With love ,

Your wife of twenty-three

years to the day,

Gwenette Minnow Pea

PS. Perhaps if I chose to take another bath later this evening (while our dear daughter is working her evening shift at the launderette), you might reconsider your earlier decision about “barging right in.” (Tee hee.)

NOLLOPVILLE

Thursday, August 17

Ellakins,

Young Master Creevy was sent away today. When the flogging had ended, he allegedly (I was not there.) raised his head and let spew forth a long and repetitive illicit-letter-peppered tirade against the L.E.B. officers who had administered his punishment. He was not even granted time to pack a suitcase. I will hear more of his story when his mother addresses a meeting of the Parents and Teachers Association at the Village school tomorrow night. Within an hour of this act of civil disobedience, Master Creevy was tossed upon an outbound commercial trawler, with the summary warning that to return to Nollop would mean immediate execution.

Dear Ella, what have those fools on the Council wrought? The meeting tomorrow will allow us to vent our anger and frustration. I truly look forward to it.

Your cousin ,

Tassie

NOLLOPTON

Friday, August 18

Dear Tassie,

I’m eager to know how the meeting went. I wish we could speak on the phone — that phone service between town and village were reinstated; the Council continues to refer to the outage as a temporary “hurricane-related disruption” (the hurricane in question having occurred thirteen months ago). I don’t believe them. I think it represents, instead, the persistent degeneration of all means by which this island may someday enter the Twentieth Century, let alone the Twenty-first. Until I can procure cups and a massive coil of string, these letters that pass between us will comprise our sole means of communication, and we should try to make the best of them. Please write as soon (and as often) as you are able.

I have some news. It is too early to know what to make of it. Or how the Council will proceed. But the possibility does exist that scales may soon fall from the eyes of the esteemed H.I.C., and they might see their way to rescinding this horrible law.

I base this belief, dear cousin, on something that has just occurred: another tile has dropped from the cenotaph: The tile upon which was etched the letter “q” (from the word “quick”). A shopkeeper witnessed the event, and made the report. The Council went into emergency closed-door session. They may emerge in minutes, or it could be several hours. They have requested a large platter of crullers and Danish.

Love ,

Ella

NOLLOPVILLE

Saturday, August 19

Dear Ella,

We had heard about the second fallen tile. We hope and pray that the Council will come to its senses on the matter.

Last night Mother and I attended a very emotional meeting of our Village’s Parents and Teachers Association. Through bitter tears Babette Creevy related the details of the banishment of her son. Initially, the boy refused to go. While his father pleaded to the L.E.B. thug-uglies to ignore young William’s boldly insolent hurlatory, to Willy’s mother fell the difficult task of propelling her son with every ounce of maternal passion onto the boat that would serve both as his transport to permanent exile, and, paradoxically, the very instrument of his survival.

Those who witnessed the incident agreed with Babette’s account of parental paralysis in the face of naked martial tyranny.

A rage burns deep within me, dear Ella, the likes of which I have never felt before. Yet collaterally a terrible fear has taken hold, robbing me of any thought of recourse. While I want to believe that the self-destruction of the second tile will bring the Exalted Quintet to its collective senses, the very real possibility exists that they could — these self-proclaimed High and Almighties — find in its demise true validation for their earlier decree and convenient justification for its subsequentia. And we sit powerless to convince them otherwise.

Please write me as soon as you know something. Mother and I feel so isolated here in the Village. While we still receive the weak signal of the limited island radio broadcasts, music is almost all that is sent up to us these days. Music without words. The station management, I assume, does not wish to examine song lyrics for words containing the outlawed letter. Besides making us all fearful, this edict has turned some among us into shameful indolents.

And if I hear “Tijuana Taxi” one more time, I am going to scream!

Your cousin ,

Tassie

PS. Thanks bunches for the birthday card. And thank you for adhering to my wishes and not sending a present. One small, mischievous joy during these otherwise joyless times is finding myself a year older than you for five whole months, although nineteen feels little different from eighteen if you want the truth of it.

NOLLOPTON

Monday, August 21

Dear Tassie,

No doubt, the latest edict has reached the village by post or has been tacked to the proclamata board on your village commons. At the cusp of midnight on August 27/28, as you surely know by now, the letter “Q” will be stricken from our vocabulary as utterly and thoroughly as was its hapless predecessor.

I am incapable of any reaction beyond that which I have previously registered with you. Life, no doubt, will change little from what we now know; as luck would have it, there are simply not all that many words in the English language which claim this letter among its constituents. I am in agreement with you that as our anger against the Council grows, it has yet to exceed in potency the abject fear which invades all aspects of our readjusted lives.

There have been whispers of a Council recall; yet few, if any, among us know how to effect such a thing. Legal recall was, even prior to the incineration of the relevant statutes, a complicated process, and now, in the absence of written guidelines, remains a virtual impossibility. Others have whispered of a military coup. Yet the Island L.E.B. is handsomely paid and well provided for. I can see little to entice these officers to overthrow a government that has for the most part been both friend and ample provider, let alone an exemplar of political stability for most of its one-hundred-and-thirty-year history in the hemisphere.

We have at present no recourse but to mind our p’s and bury our q’s, and try our best to eke out some crumbs of normalcy from our turvied lives.

Without, I am sad to report, an island newspaper. The editor and publisher of The Tribune , Mr. Kleeman, has, in one grand and glorious protest, put out his final issue, and ignoring his family’s rich island heritage, voluntarily departed this cursed sandbar. But not before publishing and leafletting this town with hundreds of copies of a most special swan song edition, carrying the apt title, “The Bees’ Lament”—being a delightful four-page conversation between two bees marooned upon a keeperless farm. The paper — I wish I could have sent you a copy, but destroyed it quickly after Mum and Pop and I shared a tearful laugh — contains, below the masthead and the aforementioned title, the frenetic repetition of a certain letter — four thousand, perhaps five thousand glorious times!