My Dearest Jonah Read Free Page B

socket in America. Only in his excitement he had copyrighted the snappy name and not the technology, and so his prosperity was
over before it had begun. He did not hold his misfortune with dignity, in much the same way some men can’t hold their liquor (incidentally another flaw of his, despite almost nightly attempts
on the contrary). When I arrived in this particular park just two years ago, on the exact date of my first letter to you Jonah, Deloris was a svelte young mother with a swing to her step that would
make a grown man change religion. Now, just a few hundred days later, she looks like she belongs to the legs under which the cartoon cat and mouse forever wage war.
    She was fast and easy with the truth, the way the formerly pretty and otherwise vacant tend to be. And so her life story was mine for the taking. I was so bored sometimes I’d stop
listening. Sometimes I think she knew, and I honestly don’t think she cared. When it came to my turn I’d feed in the tiniest inaccuracies - an unlikely embellishment here, a
contradiction there - to see if she’d pick up. Either due to politeness, stupidity, or simply the fact that I was but an inconvenience to her stream of spoken thought I do not know. But she
never did, Jonah. Not once.
    Inside, each item that could have been broken by hand or bat was. My glorious television - black and white, bought for fifty dollars by the smoothest talking beggar I ever had
the pleasure of meeting - was smashed in half, the empty screen lay in fragments across the carpet like glitter, its insides kicked in such a manner that the volume knob had embedded itself in my
Rita Hayworth poster. My clothes wrapped around one another on the floor like lovers or victims of some terrible ordeal; a trouser leg penetrated the waistline of my most expensive pantyhose; the
arms of a crisp shirt, torn, wrapped defiantly around a vest like a lioness protecting her cubs. My underwear ripped to shreds. The flimsy work surfaces were scuffed and doused in liquids and the
walls were kicked through with holes, causing the light to streak through me like celestial arrows. My bed had been fully upturned and my make-up shattered into an iridescent pool on the carpet.
But, most devastatingly, a single blow had split in half my most prized possessions atop the ornate coffee table I had bought for that sole purpose.
    What they destroyed was you. Or rather they had tried.
    I had collected you in the furthest corner of my bedroom. You’re two short hairs plucked from the deepest recess of an envelope and now taped to a laminated card. You’re a hurriedly
cut out advert from the Morning Echo advertising the scheme on which I was first introduced to you, and a rejected visiting order which I submitted in secret only two weeks later; the
arrival of which felt like the biggest betrayal of my life. You’re a penny from a wishing well artlessly scooped up the day I posted said request in the vain hope some of its luck would bring
us closer together. You’re a bottle of cologne, whose name required a two day round trip to a perfumer in the city who, when presented with the sealed envelope and its mummified odour,
proclaimed it to be the ghostly trails of the kind of aftershave bought by middle aged men from dime stores across the land. You’re dozens and dozens of ink stained sheets whose very scent
makes me feel grounded in a way that reality never quite has. Your words, your precious words, scattered across my bedroom floor like confetti the day after a wedding.
    I wept when I saw what they’d done to you.
    But you get no points for moping in this life, Jonah. So I changed tack. I fortified and solidified as if to save face. I scooped you up and threw you carelessly into an
overnight bag, along with a few bare essentials and - after a brief scrabble on all fours like some feral child - secured my car keys before driving far and fast to the borders of the next town. My
pockets heavy with