Epistolary Novella

April 22, The Year of Our Lord 1111

Dear Nhu,

I hope this letter find you well, dear sister. I worry about you, all alone in a new marriage to a man you barely know. This letter should bring you a level of comfort, to hear the words of a sister when you are now constantly surrounding by strange.

            I feel bereft without your company. I am a young woman all alone, with you in a far village, married and proper and I, spinster age, all alone. To think that you married before I did.  I do hope to see you again, sister. Boat travel is unwieldy, but if to see you at the end, I would risk my terrible fright of water. I’m sure I could stay below-decks for the majority of such a journey.

It’s the year 1111 and many say we are due for a bad year, with those awful repeating numbers. I do not quite believe the superstition, but I am more careful walking down the street certainly.

            I have a new dress, bought for my joy at being 22. It’s a lavender silk, in the style that you always envied and admired. It swirls when on a jaunt and, oh, it amuses me. Not much does these days, without your giggle at my side. I am aware that you already have three such dresses, but no matter, I wished for you to know of my simple happiness at my latest possession.

            Do you remember the simpler times? Back when both our parents were alive and we lived oblivious happy little lives as the daughters of a great landowner? Buying sweets at the sweet-sellers each time mother let us accompany her to town? The games we would play in our little courtyard, me a delicate young princess and you my mother the queen who would try to marry me off to any plant, cat or dog that wandered into our tiled kingdom?

            I feel quite reminiscent. This house is too big for just one person, Nhu. Yes, mother and father are buried on the hill behind the house, but that is no company. Bones don't talk, at least to sane people. The servants, well, it wouldn’t be proper in the slightest for me to make acquaintances with any one of them. Maybe I will attempt to make friends among the other people of our station here.

            I was in the capital the other week and found the most delightful necklaces at a store. The merchant was quite befuddled by my perfect pronunciation, as he apparently did not think me high-class, but soon recovered enough from the shock to sell me a necklace or three. I told him they were for friends, but in truth, they were all for me. I justify it because we certainly can afford it, being that I am the sole heiress of the agricultural empire father has nurtured into fruition here and that I was feeling unlike myself.

            I must go. The books need to be looked at and you know father would rise out of his grave if I did not oversee such action myself. It is good that the emperor has a new push for agriculture, it certainly benefits us. And the lawyer is coming by again, no doubt aghast by father’s decision to leave all to his daughter, an unmarried, shriveling daughter at that.

To conclude, I am aggrieved to say that I am not feeling my utmost. It might be a combination of you leaving and the new stares I draw as an even older unmarried, unattached woman of repute. People talk, you know. 

I think I shall put one of father’s remedies to the test to try to remedy this. Though people are not especially inclined to offer themselves to die on my blade. It seems to get harder and harder to find someone to bathe my blade in the blood of. Oh, well, I will find someone disposable. Just as father always said, “A murder done is a day well won.”

Your sister,

Anh

The Year of Our Lord 1111

Dear Nhu,

            I know I haven’t written for a while. Last time I wrote you, I wasn’t feeling my utmost. I suspected it was due to my sudden aloneness in the house and the feeling of not having you here every day, sister, but I am not quite sure that is the case.

            I have a new symptom to report. At first, I was just not sleeping well and feeling lethargic and tired during the day, but now my neck seems to have gotten larger. I haven’t changed what I eat, so I think it must be due to the strange new sickness I seem to find myself afflicted with. Are my humors off? I do detest blood-letting, but I will do so if I must.

            I am serious, my neck is swollen, as large as if I was set on by a bees’ nest. I do not know what to make of it. Maybe another disposal will help, but alas…

            …father’s age-old advice did not help me! In the past, it always has. Sister, when I killed my first, what, 14 years previous, I felt such a rush, such an intake of emotion and power and it was glorious. Despite the impropriety of speaking of such sentiments, I knew you felt the same way after your first kill. It was a peasant, wasn’t it? So was mine.

            This time, my blade chose a beggar that has bedeviled the gates of our home for many a week. Always shows up at inopportune times, when investors or lawyers are by, or on the rare occasion a suitor shows up claiming to be after me, not my money. Anyway, she is now gone and I am sure the servants are glad to be rid of the smell.

            I dumped the body over the bridge a village over. Not that much anyone would care, but I did not want authorities coming near our property. I do detest the color they wear.

            There have been whispers of the Chinese and other foes attempting to invade Vietnam once-more, but I do not know the veracity of such. I am sure that some amount of them have tried to breach our armies. Yes, living near the capitol has its benefits, but living here is almost political, censored and prettied up.

            I do not know why I wanted to tell you of that, but I felt like it needed to be said. Besides, since you moved out to an outlying village, I worry you do not receive the accuracy of the news that I do. I worry that your very intelligence is diminishing by living out there, but your marriage was strategic so who am I to speak against it?

Sickly, yet happy for you,

Anh

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

I apologize for the time that has lapsed between the letter that preceded this one and this. Much has happened. All will be conveyed to you in this rather short missive, apologies again for the time interval.

            I am petrified of water. You, dear sister, above all, should know this. I have to take my yearly bath with my eyes closed and a mild sedation of poppy coursing through my veins. And what could have befallen me in my time of sickness that was worse than the dreaded yearly bath?

            A flood, my dear Nhu. A flood. All kinds of water swarmed the house, confining me to my chambers in fear that the brackish liquid would find me fodder for its perilous grasp. Bodies floated by, bloated by time and gas, in a torrent that seemed to be a surefire deadly omen for yours truly.

            Once, I saw the corpses of what had to be an entire family floating by the crack in the curtains. There was a woman in wedding finery, a man at her side who had to be her betrothed, and two sets of parents, all dressed to the nines. They were at the state of decomposition just on the border of looking human and looking like green creatures of unknown origin.

I think it was a prediction of my future, marriage-less and barren of any happiness or fruitfulness.

            I have not left the house in three months. The waters have subsided significantly, but I still do not want to leave this tenuous haven I have found myself in in these enclosed walls.

            Just the thought of venturing somewhere with the threat of brackish, devil-liquid is enough to send me into a faint and one of the servants going for the smelling vapors. I woke in the middle of my sleep as a child to dreams of being floated down rivers, still alive and screaming for help and receiving no answer, crying.

I remember that you would comfort me in those moments, sister and insist that tomorrow would be better. You would assure me that father would find some hapless soul to meet the kiss of my blade and surely my spirits would be revived after that. I realize it was an odd situation, you the younger, comforting the one who was supposed to be older and wiser, but none the matter.

The flood was a result of a particularly heavy rainy season, the servants talk in their whispers. I believe the sky was weeping for your loss. Or it could have been weeping for father, but I do not believe that such a hateful man would warrant such a reaction.

Enough of these morose sentiments. You have not been adequately forthcoming about your new life with me. Tell all, dear sister, for certainly, I have no one to repeat your secrets and hidden thoughts to. And to answer your question, I have disposed of three more since we last wrote, but my neck seems to be getting more and more engorged by the day. Alas.

Your ailing sister,

Anh

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

I have received your well wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery from my malady.  I am sure that said wishes arrived long after you meant them, but the sentiment still rings true. I appreciate the concern and know that it comes from a place of care, as you said. Unfortunately, your hopes did not come true and I find myself in a worsened state.

I do not wish to make our correspondence a list of my physical complaints, but since you inquired, I will wax on them just this once. Besides my neck being larger than usual and tender to the touch, there are strange growths and bumps in my mouth.

I do not know what caused the latest development. I have two tasters who test my food for poison, just as father did when he was in this world. I only eat food from vetted vendors and never purchase street food or accept it from someone I do not know. As father did.

But despite all my precautions, new bumps and lumps appear in my mouth each day and there is naught I can do to stop it. I’ve tried tinctures from the herb-woman, suffered through a summoning of spirits by the woman from the village who smells like a goat and secretly saw the witch woman as well. None of their cures did anything for me, they made me cough and gag until I couldn’t keep a morsel down.

I have been keeping up with father’s personal remedy for all ills. But since I have been so ill, I have not ventured far for my kills. I dispatched two servants in an attempt to improve my health and tossed their carcasses over in a ditch left by the rains of last year with the other molding bodies. No one will care two more bodies on top of hundreds. That’s the only good thing to come of this rain, dear sister. No suspicion as to where dead bodies come from.

I have designs to dispatch a batch of useless peasants later this week. They fell ill to a pestilence and have been confined to the old disease hut in the village. I do not think anyone will mourn their passing, and most will in fact bless it. I will leave the bodies there, I think. No need to hide my kills.

 I pace and pace, wearing a pattern into the floor with the stress of not knowing what this illness is as my worry’s driving force, the impetus behind. I surely would drive a man mad with all my frenzied steps, if I had a husband to drive to insanity. Maybe in this instance it is good that I am the unmarried sister.

Sorry to burden all my thoughts on you, but you are the only one who truly understands what I am going through. Sister, I must ask, do you have any intent to ever return here? It’s so quiet.

Anh

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

     I have had the most horrendous dream, dear sister. I know it is uncharacteristic of me to start a letter to you with such a fanciful notion as a dream, but this you must hear. I assure you.

     It was pitch night, black as coal or beautiful teeth. I was standing above a body, but the lack of light prevented me from seeing who it was. It was obvious that I had dispatched this person to the nether-sphere. I, as any rational killer, was dragging the body to the bridge at the west end of the propeerty, to toss it in the river.

     This is where it gets weird, dear sister. I finally reach the bridge, dragging my cloth-wrapped parcel behind me and I remember feeling extremely tired and annoyed about the weight of it. But that's for another dream analysis, I'm afraid.

     As I go to haul the body over the bridge, I see I am not actually on the bridge at all. I look down at my feet and I am suspended in the air above the graves of our parents. The body is suspended next to me, floating a good three feet from the ground, yet laying flat.

     My perceived motion of hauling the oddly weighty body over the edge dumps the body onto father's grave and in the process splits his headstone in two. There is a crack right through the characters of his name, in a way that mars his name unrecognizable.

     Weirder yet, when I finally sink to the ground and go to retrieve the interloping body from father's grave, I open the hasty cloth wrapping to find a body-shaped stack of our childhood toys. Specifically our dolls.

     Sister, I have not seen those dolls in twelve or more years. You are younger so you must have seen them more recently than I, but why was I dreaming them in perfect detail? Is this a sign? Is this a metaphor of some sort?

     I have no earthly idea. I wish for your counsel on this matter. I still feel dreadful and perhaps this odd dream of mine was just another one of my ailments. I do not know. I do not like this feeling of not knowing. I do not appreciate it. I detest it.

     There is a worker in the village who has spent the past five days truant from work in the fields. He has been sipping fermented rice wine at home, according to the village gossip. I think I have found the method of clearing my head, dear sister. Perhaps after his body goes down the river, I will have been freed from the clutches of my odd dream.

Best wishes and please get back to me posthaste,

Anh

The Year of Our Lord 1112

Dear Nhu,

            I write to you most distressed, sister. First, my neck was swollen, then I found strange growths in my mouth, then there was that odd dream and now I keep feeling cold. I wear layer upon layer and have taken up permanent residence in my bedroom, with blanket upon blanket of down and fur atop me.

            Is it all for naught? I try remedy after remedy, herb-woman after herb-woman, apothecary after apothecary, séance after séance, but nothing yields the result I want. This might have to do with the fact that after each herb-woman, séance leader or apothecary fails to cure my ailment, I dispatch them with the sharpest of the three knifes I keep in my boot. Maybe.

            But the two might be completely uncorrelated. Father was widely speculated to be the one heaving bodies over the old bridge, but he never got sick. I mean, the man was killed by the father of a man he killed, but you know, that’s completely separate from his remedy for all ills.

            Nhu, I cannot retain any warmth in my body. I scald myself in a bath, I know they are unhealthy but they are so warm and delicious in the moment and then that heat is robbed from me by a gremlin of fate. I have left offerings for the ancestors, I have prayed and prayed.

            I killed 12 people this week. And even that did not bolster my spirits. Dear sister, I am starting to worry that something might actually be wrong. I’m taking remedy at every meal, scouring the countryside for the best of the best and quietly carrying through with father’s personal cure-all at all turns, but nothing is working. I am on my last nerve, my last moment of lucidity before I slip into madness.

            And recently, with my ailment, bedridden and slipping into and out of reality, with these horrendous dreams, it has been harder and harder to kill people. I had to bring a maid into my confidence in order to gain access to the number of victims I needed. What was father’s saying again? “Add one life to take to keep well, Add five to take if feeling poorly, Add ten to take if feeling violently ill?” Something along those lines.

            Well, as far as I can compute, I am executing father’s remedy with interest. Hopefully it works. Which reminds me, I need to dispose of the maid I mentioned earlier. I do not think I can trust someone of the lower classes and well, I think she already thinks ill of me. She will spill my secret eventually, so it is better that I spill her lifeblood first.

            Nhu, is there an apothecary you trust in your newly-wed village? I am dying for a recommendation worth its salt. And if you do have a name for me, and it does not prove fruitful, well, the apothecary will be dying too.

Your ailed sister,

Anh

The Year of Our Lord 1113

Dear Nhu,

I have been to my last apothecary, my last wise woman, my last charlatan. I have been told what it is that ails me. It was the woman you sent that eventually told me what was wrong with my humors.

She said it was an in-balance of the daily humors that live in my body. Serenity was unequal with death in my body and that was what was causing my illness. She prescribed a course of bloodletting and compresses. I trust her guidance because it was approved by you, dear sister.

She said that you sent her, dear sister. She stood at my bedside and told me my sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her. My sister sent her.

My sister is not alive. My sister hasn’t been alive since I was barely a woman. My sister, my Nhu, died of the ailment that many children fall prey to: the sweats and the chills and the rash, then death. Nhu exists with our ancestors, not with me.

Nhu, you were never married, never sent off to a village to marry a man without your dear sister by you side. Nhu, you never received any of the letters I have been sending you. Nhu, you never recommended this wise woman who stands at the top of my bed.

Nhu, you do not know that I have spent the last years of my life in a place where they lock up those whose minds are not entirely right. You do not know that my bed is bolted to the floor and a burly man posted outside my door so I may never leave.

What the woman at my bedhead says is true, I have an illness. An illness of the mind, dear dead sister. An illness that caused me to write these frenzied letters to someone who is no longer corporeal with my nails and anything I could find onto these walls that cage me in.

Father is still alive, Nhu, resting easy on the family plantation. Father is dead only to me, his dear daughter who he let the law and the prince lock up with no key. He is dead because he knowingly let this happen to me. He is dead because he thinks I am not right, that I am the mass murderer of the countryside, and yes, while that is true, I have not killed anyone since they left me in this turret to die.

I suppose it is penance for the lives I have taken over the years, since you were ripped from my girlish arms at the behest of the angel of death and disease. Father never taught me how to kill, no, he was too proprietary for that. I taught myself. I practiced on all of those frog corpses that dismayed the servants so. I was always this way, dear dead corpse-sister. It only emerged fully when you passed.

Sister, there is something wrong with my head. And oh, dear, I believe I like it. And I just might suspect that it likes me.

Anh

Postscript: I have almost run out of space on these plain walls to continue our correspondence. Four years takes up a lot of wall space.

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

I do not know why I continue to write.


 I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to.I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to. I do not know who I am writing to.


Why do I write? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?


I have no visitors. I have no one to care for me except the people in my head, long gone from this earthly world. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk.  They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk. They don't talk.

Why do I continue to write?

Anh

Postscript: Anh is unresponsive, seen to seem to be sleeping. No amount of prodding, blood-letting, or other such techniques will rouse her. Experts have come and went, at the expense of the father, and have concluded that the spirit has left the body. It is a shell, with eyes open to the ceiling, never wavering. The staff refuses to enter unless strongly threatened. Many sympathize with this.