Letter to the Constable,
No. 1

Dear Mr. Baudelaire,

This is my last letter. I’m going to assume you are dead, since you have failed to return my correspondence, and it is better to think of you as dead than damned. To betray a witch is eternal sickness, and to scorn a poet is to ensure that your most beautiful stories will be woven into curses.

So, since you are dead, I am writing this letter to you as my final grievance, and to say goodbye to your likeness as it currently appears, stylish and golden, in the beauty of my fantastic imagination.

I now rise before the sun and watch its gentle hues illuminate the waking world. It’s unnatural for me after months of haunting the manor halls so late in the evening, peeking into the kitchen to see if you nibbled your bread or sipped from your wine cup. But I have grown to reverence the silence.

Sibyl hardly stirs in her enclosure, especially when it is slightly too chill, and the plants are doing their best just as I am. We breakfast together in silence.

Your voice still echoes in the caverns of me, but not like the warm hum of you when our edges are pressed together. Like a song’s end floating from the mouth of a cave miles away,

An inkling, the final reverberations of one celestial body passing through another.

XO,

Lady Baudelaire