I am going to send this letter to you today. I will write again as soon as I can. I can verify now, thinking is the deepest act of transgression. We can change everything in our mind: synapses, programs, ideas, thoughts, false histories, unobtainable futures – it is dangerous and it is not good for me but I won’t stop doing it, not for mermaids, or sirens, not for dictators, or racists, or creeps, I won’t stop for Mr Udnam, or Mary Dick, or the army, or God himself, I have set my mind to it now and I won’t stop thinking as deeply as I possibly can, for nobody.

You are in my best thoughts always,

Levi

1913

Flat 1F1

Jessie MacRae (24) the conclusion

THERE HAS been no two-room croft to clean. No byre to build. No drywall to stack. Malevolent skies do not roil toward each other violent as a cauldron. Endless fields do not remain barren each morning. Winter does not last a whole nine months. There are no islanders to watch my every move. The paths are not littered with sheep skulls. No blackened gorse to snag my skirts. No fallen rocks to stumble over, or worse, draw blood on the way home. What starving animal might catch the scent of such a thing? At night-time the light does not come only from stars or oil. No smashed eggs stolen from eagles’ nests to incite my wordless fury. I don’t have to feel my mother’s unremitting sorrow. Giant birds do not circle me on the way home. The empty coffins that my father built, used to sit outside our kitchen window so we would see them each morning – now they are all gone!

Elise’s sisters have accepted the child as hers. The pipe is always filled. There is a choice of not one but several fine sofas in our apartment. There is art in all of the rooms. I often stand barefoot and look at it with a glass of wine in my hand, or gin, or whatever it is I want to drink. Mr Udnam’s library has more books than a person could read in a lifetime. My child sleeps on Egyptian cotton sheets. I should be grateful.

I am not.

Roll a cigarette.

The smell of Elise is still on me and it is more than soothing.