Copper Plates and Petal Dust

Joan Baines was thirty-two years old and bored out of her skull on a Tuesday night in February when she got the idea. She worked the reception desk at the transport office in Babin Zub, and her whole day had been four phone calls, one lost package, and a man who argued about a stamp for twenty minutes. She came home to the apartment, boiled water for instant coffee, and saw the box of letter paper her aunt had given her two birthdays ago. Still sealed.

She opened it.

Brett was on nights that week at the peat site, greasing the conveyor track under the tarpaulin shed east of town. She'd see him Sunday, maybe. Five days of nothing but his tired voice on the phone at six in the morning, saying he'd slept fine when he clearly hadn't. She was sick of it. She was sick of the whole routine, honestly. Same bus, same desk, same casserole.

So she wrote.

Dear Brett. I have a game and you're going to hate it and love it, I promise. One week. No phone calls, no texts, nothing with a screen. Just letters. Ink and paper, like people did before we were born. You write me from the shed, I write you from the kitchen table, and we see if two people our age can still make each other feel something with nothing but handwriting. Do you accept or are you chicken? Joan.

She walked it to the box by the bakery at nine at night, feeling slightly ridiculous, and then went home and slept better than she had in months.

* * *

He got the letter Wednesday because the mail truck only came up the plateau road when it felt like it, which was usually late. Brett read it twice in the shed, sitting on an upturned crate, while the lamp on the grease drum guttered and spat. He was thirty-four, his hands smelled of lithium grease no matter how he washed them, and he was grinning at a piece of paper like an idiot.

He wrote his reply during the four a.m. lull, when the track ran quiet and the cold got so sharp it stung the inside of his lungs. He had to warm the pen cartridge under the lamp to keep the ink flowing. That was a fact he was proud of.

Dear Joan. Fine, I accept, but you should know the conditions here are barbaric. It's minus eighteen and the wind comes across the peat like it has a personal grudge. Every breath feels like swallowing a nail. My lamp has a cracked chimney, did I tell you that? The crack throws this long bent shadow across the tarp whenever the flame flares, and for the first hour tonight I kept thinking someone was standing behind me. It was the shadow of my own lamp. I jumped and nearly dropped the grease gun, so if you ever need a laugh, picture that. The moon on the frozen peat is something else though, Joan. It's silver and endless and there's nothing alive out there except me and the wolves, and the wolves are a long way off but you can hear them. Answering each other. It makes a man think strange thoughts. Your turn. Brett.

He sealed it with a strip of tape because he'd never owned an envelope in his life, and left it in the shed's outgoing crate for the supply driver.

* * *

Joan's second letter came Friday, and it was different. He could tell before he opened it, because she'd used a darker pen and pressed harder.

Dear Brett. Okay, so the game is working and I blame you entirely. I wrote three drafts of this and the first two were about the weather. The third one is what I actually think about when I'm supposed to be transferring calls. So here it is. If I were out there with you tonight, here's what I'd do. I'd come into the shed and stomp the snow off my boots and complain, because I would be complaining, you know I would. Then I'd push my hands up under your coat to get warm on your chest, because your chest is always a furnace, I remember that from Belgrade, don't pretend you don't know what I mean. And you'd say something like "careful, grease," and I'd say I don't care about the grease, Brett. Then what happens next is your department. Write back. Joan.

He read it three times. Then he checked the time, walked twice around the shed to clear his head in air that could freeze his eyelashes, and sat back down.

Dear Joan. You can't write a thing like that to a man on nights and expect him to function. I re-greased the same bearing twice. The foreman will find that out someday and I'll have to live with it. Since you asked what happens next, here's my answer, and I want you to picture it properly. The moon is up and the peat is frozen flat and silver to the east, miles of it, and you walk out onto it. I mean really walk, the way you do when you've decided something. Your boots crunch on the frozen ground with every step and I can hear it from the shed, that slow crunch, crunch, and the stars out here are so close it feels like you could touch them, like they're hanging just over your shoulder. I come out to meet you and the cold doesn't matter anymore, which is physiologically impossible, but this is my letter and I say it doesn't matter. Your turn, and I have a feeling I know what's coming, and I approve in advance. Brett.

* * *

She read that one standing at the mailbox Saturday morning, in her coat, with her breath fogging, and a neighbor asked if she was all right because she was standing there grinning at a piece of paper. She said she was fine. She was more than fine. She marched home and started her third letter before her coffee finished dripping.

Dear Brett. It's your turn to be dared, so sit down. Or stand, I don't know how you people work out there. Here is the dare. Describe the exact moment you'd first kiss me on that plateau. Not generally. Exactly. Where you'd put your hands. What I'd be saying right before. What the cold air would feel like between us right up until it didn't. Every detail, Fitzpatrick, and don't you dare skip to the end, I want the whole slow approach. You have one week to make me feel twenty-three again, and so far you're at two for two. Don't blow it. Joan.

She didn't even sign it with anything flirty at the bottom, because the letter itself was the flirt, and she knew it, and it felt fantastic. She put it in the box by the bakery and walked home with her chin up, past the bus stop and the gray office windows and the whole gray town, and none of it bothered her one bit that morning.

* * *

Brett got it Sunday evening, on his last shift of the week, which felt like some kind of cosmic joke because now he had to top everything he'd written on the very night the wolves were closest. He'd been hearing them all shift, nearer than usual, their calls rolling in over the frozen ground from somewhere east of the shed. The lamp chimney crack had gotten worse too, the shadow it threw now bent at a full angle, a crooked dark arm swinging across the tarp whenever the flame moved.

He sat down on the crate with her letter in his lap and thought, this woman is going to kill me and I'm going to thank her for it.

Dear Joan, he began, and then stopped, because the detail she wanted deserved better than the first thing that came to him. He held his hands over the lamp, watching the crooked shadow breathe on the tarp wall, and listened to the wind come off the peat, and tried to remember the exact way she had smelled