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Every so often, Alim wakes to a new letter on his bedside table.
They’re not scheduled deliveries. If they were, he’d be staying up all night every Tuesday (or every 8th, or every even-numbered second Sunday). Alix is too smart to let him pull a trick like that. If she knew he lost sleep over her letters, she’d never let him hear the end of it.
He wonders if she sleeps much, in the Burrow. He assumes she gets at least a decent amount of rest: her letters are coherent, though sometimes she forgets the order in which she’s delivered them. Last year he had received a letter referencing “my previous note from Machu Picchu,” a note which did not grace his side table until about a week later.
“Close,” he had said to himself. “Very close.”
Regardless of temporality, like any parent, he wishes her letters were longer. Some take up almost a page; most, he laments fondly, are no more than postcards. The latest is another from Egypt. He can tell it will be written not long after she leaves.
Hey, old man!
Turns out Hatshepsut is HEAVILY time-guarded. So I visited the mortuary temple in your near future instead. Tiny spoiler: Jalil’s got a terrible little mustache! Gross!
Love,
Alix
The longest letter Alim has ever received is also the first, though it has the considerable advantage of being three letters in one. The first of the three will be written by an adult Alix. He hadn’t known this at the time of receipt.
Hey, old man, the letter began. Nearly every note will begin this way. First, I want you to read the letter in the blue envelope. You won’t believe what it says, so then I need you to read the rest of this one.
Please.
Alim, who, he recalls, had been mildly irritated at the notion of a prank, opened the blue envelope with an almost disdainful nonchalance.
Dad, he read. He remembers the chill that ran down his back the first time he read it. This sounds crazy, but I’m a time traveler. Or, I WILL BE a time traveler. I’m writing you this letter to make sure you’re ready. You’re gonna get more letters, but if I don’t write something now, I know you’ll probably throw them away. ‘Cause you’re a skeptic.
On ___ _, ___, you’re going to walk me through the Louvre like we always do. I’ll be excited. I’ll talk about wanting to take you around the world to see all the historical marvels you’ve taught me about.
There were tear stains on this section. Alim recalls how he doubted.
You’ll know what’s coming, because I told/am telling you, the letter continued. First, a portal will open up. Then, two heroes named Ladybug and Rabbit Noir will walk out. They’ll have a necklace. They’ll give it to me. (I needed it to get back the watch you gave me—THAT’S how I’m getting this letter to you.) Then I’ll realize that you knew what was going to happen. I’ll ask how you knew, and you’ll say, “You told me.”
“You told me,” Alim repeats to himself, remembering, and, as always, the words catch in his throat. When the time comes, he hopes to deliver it as effortlessly as any stage actor.
And then I’ll walk into the portal, the letter said. I’ll look back. And then I’ll be gone.
The letter ended abruptly there. Alim imagines her unable to bring herself to sign it. At the time, of course, he had not believed her. She would know he hadn’t.
What possessed him to return to the first letter as requested? Was it the careful “Please”? The oddly specific “Hey, old man”?
He suspects, though he can’t recall for sure, that it was something else, something not present on either page. He suspects that in his gut there was some pull or twinge, a sense apart from the five he was used to. Something that transcended place, but had a base understanding of time. It was as if he knew. It was as if he was always already going to carefully refold the second letter and slowly reopen the first.
First of all, I get why you wouldn’t believe that. I’ll have been pretty new at this when I write it. It took Alim almost a full minute to parse that sentence for the first time. I’m Alix, the letter continued. Your daughter. Yes, the same Alix as the Alix in the next room who just broke one of her toy dinosaurs. Don’t worry. Jalil’s got it covered.
From the other room, Alim heard a wail followed by the aggressive shushing of an overeager older sibling. Carefully, feeling the same chill as before jolt through him, he kept reading.
I know you’re not convinced yet, the letter went on, so I have one more piece of evidence: the third envelope. I’d tell you not to open it until 16:00, but I know you open it now anyway. That’s fine, just, keep it in your pocket, okay? Think of it as an experiment. You’ll know what it is when you see it. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
There’s a lot more I need to tell you before you’re ready to see me off, and there are things even I can’t prepare you for. I don’t think that anything I have told or will tell you could have made that day at the Louvre any easier—but I’ll keep trying.
So far, Alim thinks, nothing has. He looks forward to and dreads that day no differently, though he has been gifted every paltry detail. He knows what the weather will be like, start-to-end. He knows what music will play on his antique radio as he will tidy his office that morning. He knows he will notice a smudge on one of the large frames, and he knows he will pretend not to notice.
He even knows things Alix hasn’t told him. He knows he will watch the portal until it closes, and for many more minutes after that. He knows his hands, anxious despite omniscience, will sweat smears onto the letters he will carry. He knows he will, for at least a moment, feel nothing but hate in his heart for Ladybug and ‘Rabbit’ Noir—even as he knows he will thank them for looking after his daughter.
Jalil’s going to need some help in a minute, the letter began to conclude. I’m about to go after his model Trojan horse, and you know how he felt about that thing. I love you, old man. Say hi to me for me.
Alix
Alim, not heeding the subtle warning cached in Alix’s verb tenses, opened the last envelope. Inside was a single sheet of faded construction paper, folded in thirds. Alim grasped the edge between thumb and forefinger. There it was again, he remembers thinking, that chill. He unfolded it, unable to hear the impending brawl in the adjacent room.
In a child’s hand, the third letter says:
Dady
Alim wishes he could go after her. From the moment he read her first letters, he has wanted to chase her endlessly across time. He wants to scream in like a falcon and catch her and pull her away, back from the Burrow, out of the fantastic world of heroism and peril which, even now, he struggles to comprehend.
But he won’t. The truth is that, in some twisted way, Alim’s understanding of his ability to change the future dooms him to enact exactly what he knows will happen. He knows who Alix will become, and there is nothing he could ever do to keep her his, to keep her away from herself.
Rereading the postcard from the temple of Hatshepsut, Alim breaches his inner coat pocket with his free hand. Most of Alix’s letters—particularly those he knows he will bring to the Louvre very soon—are pressed between plastic sheets in a binder in his closet, but this one he keeps near his heart.
It’s a ritual of sorts. Each time he receives a letter, he must make sure it is temporally grounded: otherwise, what’s to stop it from Burrowing away under cover of night, the reverse of so many furtive deliveries?
He unfolds Alix’s shortest letter. The construction paper is soft by now, limp and tired with age. He taps the two pieces of paper together, acquainting the postcard with Alim’s undeniable present, squarely and immutably located between his past and his future. He smiles.
“Daddy!” Alim realized his children were yelling for him. He hurried, but he was just barely too late to save Jalil’s Trojan horse from Alix’s dinosaurian rage. He remembered what the letter said: you know how he felt about that thing.
He knew what Alix would write that afternoon, when he would finally convince her and Jalil to play in the same room after that morning, construction paper scattered over the floor.
He was no less surprised and overwhelmed, of course, when it happened.