Letter Eight

The Year of Our Lord 1113

To:

I do not know who to address this to. To continue to write to my sister would be pointless, as it has always been pointless. Graveyards do not have hands to receive letters from a messenger.

I could address this to myself, but to do so would be to admit to the poisoning of my mind and let it conquer. So, no, I will not do that. I could address it to father, but he is more of a spectre than the dead person I’ve been writing to for four years.

Nhu died when she was 10. I was sixteen. I was her senior in every way but we were close in a house that echoed quiet in the hallways, meals passed by breath.

She was the pretty one, the one who already had young men looking at her at her tender age. I was viewed as haggard and this is the only place I resented her. I resented her for her looks.

Odd. Odd because she lost those precious looks when she boiled over with rash, when she became delusional and had to be strapped to the bed so she would not get up and run herself into walls.

I lost my jealousy in that moment. And I gained sorrow and bereavement in that second. I determined that I would terminate the life of anyone who had ever, ever made my sister, my Nhu’s day or life or minute worse.

 I started with the maid who gossiped about our family in the village when she was off of work. Nhu would have been hurt by that. Then, it was the butcher who brought meat to the servant’s door in the kitchen every week. Once, he didn’t bow as Nhu and Mother walked by. Nhu would have been hurt by that.

As the days went on, I somehow found myself relishing the moments of exacting my little sister’s vengeance. I was doing this for her. She was with me when I held a blade poised above a hapless throat. She was with me when I dumped corpses over bridges.

These were the only times I felt close to my sister. When I took another life.

Eventually, father emerged from his papers and came to realize what I was doing. He had me confined here without a word. He hasn’t spoke to me since Nhu died. It had been two year since I started my vengenance killings, in my sister’s name.

He did not explain why he was shipping me to a large house in the countryside. He did not explain that he had bought me a bed in the only place for the mentally ill in the country. He did not explain that he had hired guards to stand at my door day and night, to watch me tight.

Tightly bound,

Anh