Member-only story
Bookworm Stories
My Point Is . . .
He waited almost a week.
And then — just when he was about to give up and make contact himself — he got the first email, which contained not a single word, whose sole content was a solitary character: “!”
Which made him smile.
Which made him frown.
Which furrowed his brow.
And then, again, he waited.
They came in a steady trickle, over the course of almost a month, less repetition than a slow, relentless, accretion, a drumbeat, a march, an orderly sequence: “!!” “!!!” and then — a witty hybrid, he thought — “!v.”
Well, alright, he told himself, she’s reading — at least. Slowly, yes, but reading.
And — if this constituted upset, her response, albeit minimalist and measured — at least she was communicating. If the first “!” had — bare minimum — unnerved him, over a period of weeks, the accumulation came to feel almost reassuring, less exclamatory, less a sign of indignation or outrage, and more evidence of steady progress: Onward!
Reading.
Onward.
But then, another change, a reversion — at least in quantity — to that first pungently distilled missive, a message of a fundamentally different . . . character: “?”