(re)read

Rereading Salvador Plascencia's sweet book, The People of Paper:

Saturn wrote Cameroon only one letter. He said he missed the smell of her. The honey, the wax underneath her fingernails, the way she kicked off her soggy shoes and left them in bed. If only it were a different time, he said. If there were no wars or Gypsies or Ticuanenses.

He closed the letter by writing: Cami, you are the bee's knees. I miss you. Love, Saturn.

He folded the letter, stuffed it into an envelope, and affixed postage. Saturn did not know her zip code or apartment number or the city where she had gone. He put her name on the envelope. Below her name he described the types of places where she might be: cities with rivers, streets with breezes, apartments with steps, rooms with canopies.

Still, three weeks later, there was no reply—just an itemized bill from the Postmaster General requesting reimbursements for maps of cities and waterways, for wind-velocity meters, and for all the man-hours spent climbing steps and peering into strangers' bedrooms.