While cleaning out her office Dr. Meade came across a letter that had been pushed under her door and had gone unnoticed for over a decade.

The sealed business envelope was addressed to Dr. Gena Meade and looked serious, like a bill or an order to cease and desist, but she recognized who had written her and knew at once that it was a love letter.

Dr. Meade held the envelope up to the window to let the May light shine through its paper and even sniffed the points of the white missive for the musk she suspected might have been spritzed around the seal. She sneezed and fingered a hole into the side of the envelope to get to the single sheet within, which was typed and single-spaced, and read:

Dear Dr. Meade,

This is a note to let you know that I appreciate your efforts to convince the faculty that I should remain at the school. I knew when I was accepted into the sculpting program that my feet of clay would be tested, and that the ash of my day would burn for an urn, and I knew that I would have a hard time keeping my opinions to myself and that this would lead to my very public ousting or – as Dr. Prana had no problem telling me – my ex-communication from even the Communications Department, but I thought that I would suffer the insults and exile alone, and did not think for one moment that you would defend me – privately (as I know you did when I overheard you talking up what you described as my “obvious talent to see what sleeps within the slab” at the end of the Fall lounge goodbye party) and then you would go on to defend me once again in a very scattered way.

I came across your in-house email wherein you stated that if I was ejected you did not know what would become of me but you knew how you would feel about the department: you would feel less about it, and eventually let others make all the decisions for you because you were close to retiring and your faculty vote would die before you. I have a string of suspicions that I will survive all this, but that you will not ever come across me again and be able to just say hello, or try to find me and catch up. We won’t see each other unless it is right now, unless it is today, this evening. So: I will be outside the statue of our seated school’s founder from 6-7 p.m., taxing the happiest hour outside regardless of the weather, with no hat, and sipping from a bottle of lime soda that is more vodka than Sprite. If you meet me there tonight, we will have our last goodbye, and if you don’t come out tonight, then I will just have to imagine you for the rest of what is sure to be a very long life.

Yours,

Jo Jo

Dr. Meade put the letter down on a lingerie catalog that she had not ordered from in seven years, but still kept receiving every month. She walked into the restroom and stood before the mirror. She stuck her tongue out at the reflection, and felt a strong urge to lift her hair up and look at her neck.

Leaving the building to get to her car she made her way over to the iron statue of the seated founder. It was really just a very big chair she thought, as she climbed up upon the metal lap to rest.

***

Roberto Ontiveros is a fiction writer, artist, and journalist. Some of his work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, the Santa Monica Review, the Baffler, and the Believer. His debut collection, The Fight for Space, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press, and his second book, Assisted Living, was published by Corona Samizdat Press.