Pen Pal Profile
I want to join the pen pal project because I think the sun wants to eat me.
I go out in it a lot. Alone.
It glints off things, and I don’t think they’re real. Sometimes I go to the dock with my fishing pole, and I cast the line out into the water, and the sun shines on the water and on the pole and on me, and nothing ever happens.
Letters to Jasper
Sarah said I needed exercise.
She said that if I thought the sun was trying to eat me, then okay, I could go out at night if that would help, but that I needed exercise. She said endorphins would be good for me.
Jasper’s reply to Cardboard City
You ask me to tell you a story of grace. I don’t know if I can do that.
I can tell you the story of a day when the sun isn’t so hungry.
I think that it must be quite pleasant in your mirror meadow with the unicorns. I would imagine that it smells better than the trash chute.
I ask her, “Why does the shish kebab taste a bit like elephant?”
She looks at me, and her lower lip begins to wobble.
She says, “The tiny elephants. They took my knives.”
Jasper’s reply to Tiny Knife Elephants
I do not think I would like these stores that remain in Windenburg. I prefer the sorts of stores that aren’t there anymore when you come back a few days later with questions about the cursed cutlery you purchased, and why all your loved ones are now zombies.
Jasper’s reply to Toomuch Notenough
Can’t sleep, the sun will eat me.
Letters to Anya
I don’t mean that things are always going wrong. I am safe inside the walls. I mean that it’s possible that the apartment exists in a bubble of spacetime where things are always going to go wrong, but they never quite do, because I don’t open the doors.
Anya’s reply to Inside the Walls
I don’t trust the other humans to make anything real. Maybe where you are, with the doors and the house that is keeping you, you are cardboard. I don’t think so, but I don’t know for sure. Even if you are on a cereal box, you sound very real to me.
Here, though, in this city with its hungry sun, I am sure that it is the other humans who are cardboard. They are thin and blurry, and I don’t think they have ever tasted caramel.
Anya’s reply to Caramel Centers
If I were to crack myself open, there would then be both a cracked Seth and an uncracked Seth, and no real state change would have occurred.
Anya’s second reply to Uncracked
I’m still not sure about the plants that grew in the garden behind the roots, if they were kind or not.
Anya’s reply to The Garden Behind
I am the Seth who told Sarah the truth.
In the Valley of the Sun 