Letters to the Editor
To The Velvet Dispatch
I’m sure this is the last achievement you expected from your latest edition, but your newspaper saved my life! Camping in the hills with my girlfriends, a surprise rain made everything damp. While Lisa and Proya scrounged around in the dirt, it was your scrunched up paper that I found as kindling. It was completely necessary, I promise you I’m no fascist! Sitting around our campfire, lit so very generously by your articles, we drank and discussed all the shit things about campus. It was fun, but before we went to sleep, it became horribly cold, and Maria was convinced she saw a large animal in the trees. Please be sure to publish a guide to exorcisms, just in case we summoned the evil spirit of your printing press.
Yours Truly,
Local Girl
To Lari Rolknav,
I read your story on the Steelworks Streetart Collective. Invigorating, truly, what this city produces, the ingenuity of our youth! I live near that district myself, you see. The smoke stacks bend over our building like long wheat stalks, as the country-boy on the floor below says. Recently, I have been wandering between the warehouses. A reporter of yours may have caught on to this, but a new piece has gone up on a grey shipping container, in the lot beside the shed with the red-lined roof, on that Fictov street always sunken like a canal, I think built by the ancients.
The piece is hot pink, abstract, sprayed both hastily and delicately. At first it is like an explosion, but come closer and you will see a woman’s face. The boy downstairs went past on a bicycle. He said she looks like his mother in an old photo, standing strong beside a ram. I cannot personally confirm the resemblance — to me she looks like a young woman I saw on the 45 tram, barely a year ago, on a day of clear skies and a lizard sound asleep in my boot. On the container wall her chin is turned upwards. A short cap shadows her eyes. I followed her gaze and saw a rising string of smoke in the darkening sky. At first I thought it must be a factory, but it was too distant, too late in the day. It rose from within the old city. Was she looking at the firesmoke with defiance? Or is she admiring the fruits of her agitation?
I’m not much of a journalist myself, but if I meet her, I will be sure to ask!
Roshel Cork
To the Editors,
Reading your article in the last edition about the announced changes to fiscal policy, I have to say I disagree with your judgments. If the spending is not cut, it is we, the people who will be bled dry by unproductivity and unemployment, just as my body has been sapped of its health by parasites. While turning the page I drifted off, and experienced the following dream. I was sitting in a chapel. Staring forward, through a haze of sickly-red light, stained by the red-glass windows. A man was splayed over the pulpit. He wore the brown military fatigues of the lowest rank. The same get up I muddied for six months belly-crawling through the marshes. The dead soldier spoke from a sunken face. He described the aromas of a busy fruit market, illustrated children shoving one another out of the way, tripping over the cobblestones. He took us along with the breeze, until we lifted into the sky. There, far above the city, I piloted a C-56 Bi-plane. The dead man was slumped in the seat behind me. One of the plane’s engines began spewing smoke. We tilted down, and dived into a sunlit cloud. In the moment of submersion, we found ourselves in an orange lamp. In this timeless space, the cockpit lights blinked like stars. The cloud fell away. Below us now was a vast ocean, fluorescently velvet. Like a flag, billowing in all directions. The engine flames entered the cockpit, and gliding ever closer towards the sickly sea, a lone object appeared. It was Praad Palace, aflame.
I have been trying to make sense of that dream since.
Robishere Mariwhere
To the editors of The Velvet Dispatch; Kristof, Marianne, Lari and the rest,
On that terrible night, snow joined the ash drifting down the street. Before me, the flames grew bright and roared like a mortar shell falling on the Steelworks. Like little dots, the snowflakes clung to my coat, and the windows shattered, and from them burst forth charred pages, fluttering in the air like flocks of doves. And my arms and face blistered furiously as I leapt, desperate to catch hold of an airborne, blackened page. And I grasped a fragment, and the weight of it threw me with the density of comments and annotations, their multiplying fury, hotter than the black glass dripping down the doorway. The paper slipped my hand.
And in the five years since that night, I have returned to Praad once. On the pavement, the page has left a burn mark. The building that was once your office has been rebuilt, and is now a pub, dingy and rotten, no memory of its previous life. You were the beating heart of our city, and, though impossible, somehow I trust this letter will find a way to reach you.
Thank you.
Your friend,
Marcel
The Velvet Dispatch, 1989 September Issue
