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embraced. The head of the Rasmussen household, Charles Rasmussen, Sr., a clothing merchant here in town, (I bought a lovely powder blue lace partete from his store just last month), responded, “It was actually my children’s idea. They are very fond of this letter and felt a protest against its removal from island discourse was very much in order. My wife and I agree. We also wish to be flogged in the presence of as many town residents as choose to be in attendance. And if this produces no outcry—especially the laying of leather tassel upon the youthful backs of my nine-year-old twin daughters Becka and Henrietta—then please trundle us without delay from thisisland of cringe and cowardice, for we no longer wish to belong to such a despicable confederacy of spinal-defectives.”
    And so Mum and Pop and I stood and watched the harrowing and loathsome sight of children being ritually beaten, and the commensurately disturbing picture of frightened onlookers—“the town baa-baas,” as Pop has taken to calling our dear neighbors—doing what they do oh so very well, and that is: absolutely nothing. Lifting not even the proverbial finger to remove these high council bastinado-benediced buffoons from their pinnacle of abusive power, nor doing anything otherwise to stop or decelerate their efforts. Watched these Nollopimpotents, Mum and Pop and I did, as they stood in willful immotility. And as we absorbed, in full, the lamentable scene being played out before us, we found ourselves entertaining identical thoughts—concretious thoughts of retaliation and the ultimate reclamation of a society so disturbingly transmogrified.
    A first meeting to be held in our home a week from tomorrow under the guise of Pop’s twice-monthly poker game. To plot and plan our insurrection—our nascent underground movement to restore a full twenty-six letter alphabet to the people—deserving or not—of this, our presently polluted island home!
    Even as this morning—in the early predawn darkness one Creighton O’Looley was discovered attempting to replace a tile newly fallen. He was apprehended and is being held without bond for attempting to circumvent this most recent misconstrual of all-holy decree from the great and omniscient Nollop.
    J.—
    It could have been worse.
    But J!
    As you might say: Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!
    Love you. Love to your mother.
    Ella
     
    SAVANNAH, GEORGIA U.S.A.
    Friday, September 8
    Dear Ms. Purcy,
    My application for visa has been approved and I will be arriving Monday, September 18, at Pier Four in Nollopton on the 4:12 WalMart supply boat. If it isn’t convenient for you or your daughter to meet me, I will find my own way up to your home in Nollopville. (It shouldn’t be difficult. I spent my childhood studying maps of your island.) As I understand the internal mainway is mired this time of year, don’t expect me until late.
    I have just received word about the loss of the tile containing the letter “J” and do not wish to wait until I see you to share important news. Chemists here in Georgia who have obtained smuggled chips from the two earlier fallen tiles have just completed an exhaustive battery of chemical analyses on the fixative that has held the tiles in place for the last hundred years. Their assessment is that the glue—a strange compound not familiar to them—glue which also oddly, and we now know impractically served as a substitute for simple, durable cement—has calcified to the point of ineffectual granule and powder. Within months, perhaps even weeks, all of the tiles currently mounted on the cenotaph will become similarly loosened and fall to the ground. The chemists doubt that within a year’s time there will be even a single tile left affixed to the monument. Should your council continue along its present course, the outcome will be too dire even to contemplate. Here I am telling you nothing you don’t already know.
    (I am, as you can also imagine, fast losing my academic