♛ ❝ the letter ❞ ⚘ it was a very normal instance, that in which vienna mctominay awoke to mail in her yellow tin mailbox. however, it was not quite as normal that the mail came from russia. in fact, she had /never/ received a thing from russia. why would she? and this is exactly what she was wondering as she stared in confusion at the letter she held. the paper was not what she would call clean. there were dirty fingerprents all over it. the handwriting looked like that of a two-year-old- or a teenage boy, like tommy bray from her class. his handwriting was dreadful. /perhaps this letter is from tommy,/ vienna thought, aware that she was becoming annoyed with tommy already. but what was written in the letter was not the kind of thing that tommy bray would send. the grammar was poor, and the words unclear with the agonizing lack of punctuation. but, surrounded by hicks who did not know their right from their left, vienna was good at deciding what people were trying to say. and from what she understood, this letter was inviting her somewhere. inviting her to a farm. /how strange,/ she thought, reading the letter for a third time. in the countryside of england in 1942, she was surrounded by farms. she had hardly ever seen a city in her life. and for years, no one had bothered to send out a paper invitation to their farm - if they wished for her to come, they simply told her so at church or at the market on tuesdays. the letter did not stop, however, at asking her to come to a farm. it informed her, with the most dreadful spelling imagineable, that to see this farm she had to board a train. at this, vienna laughed for a moment, then quickly began to frown, her brow furrowed. a train? she had not boarded a train since the long trip to manchester she and her family had made six months ago when they had made enough money off of selling milk and beef to buy good clothes and shoes. who in their right mind expected that vienna could even afford to set foot in a train station, let alone get on a train? after reading the letter a fourth time, vienna finally resolved something: she would ignore it. the farm, the train, the terrible handwriting and the even more terrible grammar- everything about the letter told her it was a hoax, and not to be trusted. she folded the letter up and shoved it back in the envelope. the very notion of all of this was rediculous. not to be tolerated. and thus she would not tolerate it. it was obviously all tommy bray's doing. so tomorrow morning, when she arrived at school, she would go right up to him and tell him what was what. /what is what?/ vienna could not possibly find an answer as she felt her skirts press against her stalkinged legs with the bitter wind that swirled about the station. she felt shame weigh upon her small shoulders as she thought of all of her anger and her frustration at the letter she had received the day before. the way she had earnestly believed that she could ignore the mysterious invitation. how foolish of her. though she supposed that yesterday she did not expect that a fully paid-for two-way ticket would appear in her mailbox. or that she would find it before her father did. or that she would end up asking mr bray for a ride, lying that her father had paid for her to visit a friend in the city. or that she would be here exactly twenty-four hours later, suitcase in one hand, tickets in the other, awaiting whatever was on the other side of this train ride..
