The Letters of Hennessy Wedgewood

"March the Thirty First

Dearest M,

I've cut it all away. Gutted it. Every last bit of what I once was. I buried it.
It kept emerging like bile on a warm rotting day-I stomped it down.
Some graves just can't be dug deep enough.
I covered it in stone & sprinkled lye. But the disease flourished. How it flourished.
I watched in horror as it just kept crawling free of it's deep hole. First, nudging the soil so barely that it looked like settling. Then, I saw it's tired fingertips emerge. Then, it became a vine-climbing, twisting, twining. My ribs! Oh the ache. As it latched on, with strange sticking fronds.
I screamed! But only flowers frothed from my mouth-my tongue laced down with rose water thorns.

And then, I felt the blood drain from me as it did when first we kissed.
I'm lonely now. Hungry for that strange taste again, to invade my mouth.
Did you ever taste such a pain as this?

Affectionately HW"

I opened the book & out fell a letter, dated March the Seventeenth of an unknown year. I looked at the dusty collection on the shelf in the basement of the old Vancouver book shop. The entire shelf had once belonged in the home library of one M. L. Brown, address unknown.
Every book, from old nature guides to poetry to biographies, fiction--had newspaper clippings, pressed flowers & leaves, marginal notes and all had letters from one, Hennessy Wedgewood, addressed to "Dearest M."
Curiosity & thrift overcame me, and I slid book after book into the wire basket, and then some, my arms red from the weight.