Billet-Doux

For S. S. She reads by the light of a guttering candle and likes the feel of each page's gilt edge as she lifts it slightly at the corner, readying herself to turn it. If the wind whips the sycamore branches outside her window, if her nightgowned shoulders shudder once from a sudden chill, so much the better, and the book must tell of children toiling for bread and pennies in a textile mill, or tender brothers doomed to sharpen their bayonets in opposing armies, or a family of refugees, dust in their mouths, gazing with longing at the far shore of a river. And I long only to be the author of that book she reads whose page glows from the same dim flame that illuminates her face, the author whose thought she contemplates as she touches a fingertip to a word to mark her place and turns her head toward the kettle that has begun to whistle.