Wenna lived in a hill town and wrote to her brother on the coast every week.
The town had no post office of its own. Letters went down to the courier house at the crossroads, where six couriers took turns on the coast road. Nobody picked which courier got which letter. The keeper of the house drew a stone from a jar, and whoever’s stone came up took the bag that day.
Wenna’s letters ran long. She wrote about the weather and the goats. She wrote about the neighbor’s roof, which had been leaking since spring, and what the neighbor said about it, and what she wished she’d said back. Her brother liked them long. He’d told her so once, and she remembered it the way you remember a thing you were glad to hear.
One week, the courier at the counter was a young man named Odo. He hefted her letter, frowned, and set it back down.
“Too heavy,” he said. “Or not right somehow. I can’t carry it.”
She took it home. She went through it at the table and cut the part about the roof, which she’d half known was too much anyway. The next morning she brought it back, a page lighter.
It was Odo again. “Too heavy, or something,” he said. “Can’t take it.”
She cut the goats.
Over the next weeks the letters went through most days and came back on some. Wenna couldn’t find the pattern, so she drew the only conclusion that seemed to fit: she wrote too much. Some days the couriers must be tired, or the road must be bad, and a long letter was a burden she had no right to hand anyone. On those days she was told so.
So she started writing short on purpose, every week, to be safe. Weather, one line. Health, one line. I hope you are well. She got good at it. She found she could say a month in four sentences, and she was a little proud of that and a little sorry.
Then came a week when Odo turned back even the four sentences.
She stood at the counter holding a letter she could have folded into her fist. “I can’t make it lighter than this,” she said. She was surprised at how her voice came out. “There’s nothing left to take out.”
The keeper looked up from the jar. Her name was Marit. She’d run the house longer than Odo had been alive, and she didn’t say anything at first. She took the letter from Wenna, set it on her own brass scale, and watched the needle barely move.
“Who told you it was too heavy?”
“He did. Lots of times.”
Marit turned to Odo. “What did you say to her, exactly?”
Odo shifted. “Too heavy, or not right. Same as I say to everyone.”
“Everyone,” Marit said.
It came out slowly, the way these things do. Odo’s satchel had a split seam along the bottom that he’d been too embarrassed to report. Anything he put in it fell out before the first milestone. So he’d stopped taking letters. And because the house expected a reason, he gave the one reason no one would argue with. Too heavy sends people home to cut. My bag is broken sends them to the keeper.
He’d always added or not right somehow. That part was true. It was the part nobody heard.
Marit took Odo’s stone out of the jar that afternoon and put it on the shelf until the seam was mended.
Wenna walked home with her four sentences. She’d kept the drafts she cut, out of a habit she couldn’t explain, and that night she spread them across the table: the roof, the goats, a page about a dream she’d had. Nearly three months of things she had decided were too much. None of them had been.
Her brother hadn’t asked why the letters got short. She found she wished he had, and then she understood why he hadn’t. A sister whose letters suddenly shrink looks like a sister who’s tired, or busy, or a little angry. He’d taken the cut pages as a message, the same way she had taken the refusals as one. Both of them had read the missing thing as being about themselves.
She didn’t try to put everything back. Some of it had gone stale; the roof had been fixed in August. She did write the next one long. It covered the dream, and what Marit said, and the brass scale. At the bottom she added a line she’d never needed before:
If they ever get short again, ask me which courier it was.
The letter went through on the first try.
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