Mark Dunn - Ella Minnow Pea

I know that I am asking much from you; I am, after all, a total stranger to the two of you. (And yet from Mr. Creevy’s descriptions of you both, I do feel that I know you somewhat. I understand that some of Mr. Creevy’s happiest childhood moments were spent in your company — with you as his second grade teacher and your daughter Natassa as his middle school English tutor.)

I will certainly understand if you have reservations, and if those reservations prevent you from allowing me to stay. (If this turns out to be the case I trust that you will divulge to no one the fact that I approached you in this regard.) But if you feel as many of your fellow islanders do, that the actions of the Council should be brought to the light of public scrutiny with my earnest little journal serving as appropriate vehicle, perhaps your convictions might outweigh any misgivings you may have about the reason for and the manner of my visit.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely ,

Nate Warren

NOLLOPVILLE

Monday, September 4

(American Labor Day)

Dear Mr. Warren,

I have discussed your petition with my daughter Tassie. She has allayed my minor concerns, and so I am able to hereby welcome you to our home as “good old friend of the family.” I look forward to hearing if your application for visa will be approved. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help.

Best wishes ,

Mittie Purcy

NOLLOPVILLE

Monday, September 4

Dear Cousin Ella,

Mother is better, buoyed somewhat by the strangest letter we received last week, from a gentleman named Nate Warren who publishes a journal about Nollop. He wants to write an article for American readership on the Council’s actions of late, and for this purpose has asked if he might come to stay with Mother and me. Mother immediately wrote him back to say yes, by all means. I have never known her to act so hastily in any regard!

I must say that I am rather looking forward to the young man’s visit.

With love ,

Your cousin Tassie

NOLLOPTON

Wednesday, September 6

Dear Tassie,

I am excited to learn of your soon-to-be houseguest. Anything to boost Aunt Mittie’s foundering spirits, and yours as well!

Perhaps, by now, you have heard of the tragic public flogging of the Rasmussen family — all six members whipped like misbehaving canines on the public green as was their choice following the soon to be infamous Daffy and Donald affair.

Their offense? Each member in deliberate provocation of the High Island Council had marched single file into last Tuesday’s open session wearing cartoon masks and making loud duck sounds — sounds which any sentient Nollopian knows by now are forbidden — while holding aloft large cardboard containers of a certain recently outlawed brand of American oatmeal.

As the Rasmussens were being manacled by members of the L.E.B., Council Member Willingham asked for the reason behind such a flagrant flouting of the “clear and unambiguous” law against use of the seventeenth letter — a flouting made all the more “pernicious” by the enthusiastic abandon with which it was embraced. The head of the Rasmussen household, Charles Rasmussen, Sr., a clothing merchant here in town, (I bought a lovely powder blue lace partete from his store just last month), responded, “It was actually my children’s idea. They are very fond of this letter and felt a protest against its removal from island discourse was very much in order. My wife and I agree. We also wish to be flogged in the presence of as many town residents as choose to be in attendance. And if this produces no outcry — especially the laying of leather tassel upon the youthful backs of my nine-year-old twin daughters Becka and Henrietta — then please trundle us without delay from this island of cringe and cowardice, for we no longer wish to belong to such a despicable confederacy of spinal-defectives.”

And so Mum and Pop and I stood and watched the harrowing and loathsome sight of children being ritually beaten, and the commensurately disturbing picture of frightened onlookers—“the town baa-baas,” as Pop has taken to calling our dear neighbors — doing what they do oh so very well, and that is: absolutely nothing. Lifting not even the proverbial finger to remove these high council bastinado-benediced buffoons from their pinnacle of abusive power, nor doing anything otherwise to stop or decelerate their efforts. Watched these Nollopimpotents, Mum and Pop and I did, as they stood in willful immotility. And as we absorbed, in full, the lamentable scene being played out before us, we found ourselves entertaining identical thoughts — concretious thoughts of retaliation and the ultimate reclamation of a society so disturbingly transmogrified.

A first meeting to be held in our home a week from tomorrow under the guise of Pop’s twice-monthly poker game. To plot and plan our insurrection — our nascent underground movement to restore a full twenty-six letter alphabet to the people — deserving or not — of this, our presently polluted island home!

Even as this morning — in the early predawn darkness one Creighton O’Looley was discovered attempting to replace a tile newly fallen. He was apprehended and is being held without bond for attempting to circumvent this most recent misconstrual of all-holy decree from the great and omniscient Nollop.

J.—

It could have been worse.

But J!

As you might say: Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!

Love you. Love to your mother.

Ella

SAVANNAH, GEORGIA U.S.A.

Friday, September 8

Dear Ms. Purcy,

My application for visa has been approved and I will be arriving Monday, September 18, at Pier Four in Nollopton on the 4:12 WalMart supply boat. If it isn’t convenient for you or your daughter to meet me, I will find my own way up to your home in Nollopville. (It shouldn’t be difficult. I spent my childhood studying maps of your island.) As I understand the internal mainway is mired this time of year, don’t expect me until late.

I have just received word about the loss of the tile containing the letter “J” and do not wish to wait until I see you to share important news. Chemists here in Georgia who have obtained smuggled chips from the two earlier fallen tiles have just completed an exhaustive battery of chemical analyses on the fixative that has held the tiles in place for the last hundred years. Their assessment is that the glue — a strange compound not familiar to them — glue which also oddly, and we now know impractically served as a substitute for simple, durable cement — has calcified to the point of ineffectual granule and powder. Within months, perhaps even weeks, all of the tiles currently mounted on the cenotaph will become similarly loosened and fall to the ground. The chemists doubt that within a year’s time there will be even a single tile left affixed to the monument. Should your council continue along its present course, the outcome will be too dire even to contemplate. Here I am telling you nothing you don’t already know.

(I am, as you can also imagine, fast losing my academic objectivity; word of the Rasmussens’ ordeal reached us this morning.)

While researching the series of articles I now plan to write on the Council’s recent actions and the tangible effects those actions are having upon the residents of Nollop, I seek, in addition to your hospitality and safe cover, assistance from you in reaching that one member of the Council you feel most open to reading the chemists’ report, and making a case for a reversal of these apocalyptic directives.

It is, I believe, well worth a try.

Sincerely ,

Nate Warren