Valedictory

 

Mish,

I’m throwing in the towel not with a sense of defeat but rather a sense of pastures new (sunny uplands even). We’ve reached nigh on fifty pages, and in print the lines look straight and true, as beautiful (almost) as the new steps fronting the Leavey Building (church end). It’s time to run the thing off and let it stand on its own fifty legs. Not as a work of art, granted, but certainly as testimony to the strength and power of the epistolary form. But whoa! I must rein in my logorrhoea lest I stray into the realm of melodrama.

My final shot goeth like this: a cold coming I had of it this morning lugging my corpus to the desk. A local access road was closed and I was forced to trudge through a barren field before I could rejoin civilisation and proceed to Dublin’s heart. The field was rocky and frozen and populated by a large flock of Stymphalian birds who tracked my steps with dagger glares. At least I think they were Stymphalian birds though they may have been literary critics. The whole experience left me quite shaken by the time I entered an caisleán. Luckily, when I did, I came upon a most pulchritudinous sight that instantly lightened my mood. A female figure was sitting on the curbside eating fish from a tin with one hand and reading from the bible with the other. Her hair was long and golden, the face and overall form divine, and she seemed to me to be an angel (albeit of the fallen variety). Or, if not fallen, then certainly flying too close to the ground. She looked up from her bible, I could see her finger pause on Ezekiel 37:13 (yes, my eyesight is that good!), she smiled at me in recognition and put some more fish into her mouth. Stone my crows, I thought, it’s been quite a while but that has to be Sophie Herring Tin!

Readying the toner cartridge and not wanting to make a scene,

Serene Scanland