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thought they were turning into fish; a man who was king of New Jersey. “But hey,” he wrote, “I’m a fun king.” They began to associate you with the material, the interruptees; they associated you with the twisted scenery.
    Minnie White-White-Goldfarb padded by and dropped another U.S. Mail bag next to my IN box. She smiled. She was happy again; she and her fiancé had each agreed to drop a name. I smiled back at her.
    “More letters from loonies!” she sang.
    I looked hopefully at the canvas mail sack. After my speech at the editorial meeting and my conversation with Betty Berry, I’d found it harder than I’d thought to find publishable letters from crazies. They were either like the one from Fish-Woman, a missile with a target so specific and mysterious it was irrelevant finally, not very funny—or they were hostile, offensive, frightening as a face in the window at midnight. I’d stopped wearing my rabbit ears, but I still felt oddly split—half the time I wanted to start a bonfire in my IN box and the other half I felt like one of them.
    I upended the sack and shook out part of its contents. Blue envelopes, fuchsia, rainbow, a postcard from Sarasota Springs, Florida, fluttered free—then a postcard with a photo front. Somebody had taken a picture of Holly Partz at a rally; she stood at an outdoor podium under the trees, her long blond hair blowing, smiling into the mike, her arm raised in a feminist salute. Unfortunately, someone had inked a mustache and beard on her face and had crudely drawn what looked like a three-foot dildo in her upraised fist—on the back of the card was written, “SIS finally figures out how to use it!” in purple marker. Under the card was a sodden-looking package, I poked at it, afraid of plastique, or worse, home-cooked food. Then a letter fell free whose return address I recognized.
    Iris had chosen to write to me this time on stationery sporting a recurring pattern of small chartreuse blimps with a large green leprechaun in the margin waving a flag that said, “Top of the Mornin’ to Ya,” on it.
Dear Mr. Digby [I realized that I had forgotten to tell her I was a woman.],
    You’re right. I think every woman goes through hypnosis-rape. I think every woman is not actualized to be the person she was meant to be. Just this morning, when I found seminal fluid leaking from my panties, I said to myself— that’s how they keep women down, by violating their precious bodies! It’s rape that keeps us in line. Or, more to the point, seminal fluid! Shouldn’t we all think about this?
    The letter went on, more about seminal fluid and violation, but I decided to cut it after the first paragraph and use it, without the “Mr.” Digby. This, combined with a letter from a woman who got back at her husband (who refused to ever cook a meal for her) by secretly mixing Nine Lives cat food into his cereal every morning, and the letter from Dino Pedrelli and my answer—seemed to be the ticket. What a column!
    I whistled a little. It was all coming together. I would try these letters on my readers as an introduction, then I would publish more and more in my column (as the demand rose) of the unusual, or I corrected myself, the usual unusual. Letters from the people who were not on the political barricades but had found other ways to deal with their frustrations. It would be fascinating. I could imagine the Letters column as a kind of human event, the soul of the magazine.
    I proofread quickly, tagged the yellow sheets for publication, then turned my attention to the other correspondence, nearly barking in its impatience to be noticed. Now for the dailiness of my job, the task of teaching the lesson of official indifference—the job of slipping the Xeroxed brush-off in the SIS envelope, the job of typing the cute little letter of discouragement or downright bureaucratic censure, refusing the demands for publication, money, legal assistance, home phone numbers and addresses of staff, jobs