Review of Three Letters by Nels Schifano

Summary of Three Letters by Nels Schifano

It was autumn. Although still afternoon the journey had been spent peering at slowly moving red lights. She walked head down. The carrier bag spinning one way then the next as it clipped against her leg and he finally arrived at her home. At her gate she delayed, unwilling to break the stillness with squeaking hinges because the city was being put to sleep. She rattled the key into the lock and stepped inside. She kept her mind occupied by these happy details of returning home as she walked along the hall and into the kitchen. She lifted the carrier bag onto the worktop and reached for the kettle. Through the window she could see the outline of the narrow garden, the fuzzy grey shapes of a rusting climbing frame and overflowing compost heap and a green eyes and a flicking tails cat named Rahel appeared on the window ledge. She unlocked the door and the cat padded in.

She took off her coat and laid it over the back of the oak kitchen chair and sat down. She let her feet slip out of her shoes and raised them onto the fitted bench across the other side of the table. She unpacked the carrier bag. She put away the milk, the orange, the biscuits and the cat food. Despite a few moments when her heartbeat seemed to fill the house, it proved to contain nothing more exciting than a pile of old newspapers - more dirtiness to clean.

Inside a neatly folded bag, she found three envelopes. The paper inside the first envelope was thick and cream-colored, it had a blue letterhead and the date in the top right hand corner was July 2000. The first envelope contained about the writer that not really expected that the letter got to her. The writer also hoped that she was healthy and happy. The writer just wanted to write the letter to her and the writer wrote that her name would be there, carved in the memory of a tree. She re-folded the latter and tapped it several times against her top lip.

She took the next envelope. The letter was written on paper so white and thin that as her gaze fell across it she saw it as a shade of blue. The date was April 1976. The writer wrote about do the writer remember about the first time they met, the writer’s sadness because she wanted to looked for happiness and bought some back. That made the regret of the writer because what the writer have left is thoughts of her.

She took the last letter. The letter itself is written on a school child's lined paper, as her eyes run down the page they linger on the date, Nov. 1968 and the dappling of yellow blotches. In that letter, the writer told that he still can believe that she decided to go. He knew that she wanted to chase her dream, but the dream is so sweetly deferred here.

The freezer's cooling mechanism rattled then fell silent, and she realized that she hadn't been aware of the noise it was making. In its absence the air in the house seemed to hang with that same question; how would her life have been if she had managed to send just one of them?

In time she would fold the letter away and place it back to the envelopes and put it to where she found it. She would cover it with the layers of cloth. But now she just sat for a moment, the noise of the cat's contented breathing filling the house.

Comment:           

I have to say that this short story is really interesting to read. The words in this story are not too hard to understand. But there is word that i don’t understand what the meaning is, that word is “oak”. If I translate it to Indonesian language, the meaning is “ek” and I don’t know what the meaning is. I think this short story tell me about the sadness and the regret of the writer of the letters to the girl that choose to go far away to find her happiness the writer really loves her.

There are three characters of this short story.

Something that makes me bored to read is the author explaining much detail of the house in the beginning of story.