Gemotions

The attic air tasted of dust and forgotten things. Eleanor pulled the overflowing box toward her, sunlight slanting through a crack in the boarded-up window. Her mother's handwriting, she knew it immediately. The neat, looping script felt like a deliberate insult, a relic of a time when her mother possessed a semblance of order.

Eleanor grabbed the letter, its yellowed paper brittle. The salutation, “To Whom It May Concern,” already sparked a flicker of annoyance. Her mother, the paragon of domesticity, couldn’t even be bothered to address the letter to a specific person.

A smile stretched across Eleanor's face, cold and hard. It was addressed to the university, the job she hated, the one she escaped to be a housewife. She scanned the stilted prose, the careful phrasing, the desperate plea for a clean break. The thought of her mother, reduced to this, was almost entertaining. She threw the letter back in the box and closed the lid.