[Return letter]
[Her response is also handwritten, and it's delivered by one of the high school students that skips his classes in the bookstore. His hair is blue, and his pants are plaid, and he smells like pot.]
Dearest Alexander,
I am glad Chloe has your aid. She has failed entirely on her own. I fear she has forgotten the lessons learned so diligently at the family table. Mama is displeased, as she always is when it seems she will not have her way. I assured her you are taking the matter in hand. I do not think it eased her to know it.
Tuesday. I do not remember Tuesday. The days pass like water through a sieve, and each of them bleeds into the next and coats my bones with viscera thick as nothing. I am glad you enjoyed the moon, however, and I am glad that your mistress grows and changes to your liking. It pleases me.
Gabriel came. With a stamp of his cane upon the stairs, and with papers brandished like swords. He does not understand that I can smell the sickly sweetness of death inside me, or that I long for it with each exhale of organs gone ripe. He is feet encased in cement, so weighted to the ground that he cannot even see above his own head. He has concocted a memory of a woman that does not exist.