Viktor Wentworthington shared his silent misery with Sally Burns of West Valley, Virginia through silent, ink-dripped letters that held in them the faint scent of caramelized onion. He had 52 years and a failed marriage behind him. Alberta hadn’t been the love of his life, but she’d been his life for 43 years before cheating on him with their Pastor of the Lutheran faith. Viktor didn’t consider himself a Lutheran, but he got a great ephemeral, ironic pleasure from it and Alberta made him laugh in her viscose coat that caused her skin to break out in small red blotches, which she never seemed to notice.
Sally was the complete opposite of this. Viktor was sure of that, but not as sure as he would have been if he’d ever met the 43-year-old podiatrist, who was agnostic and a virgin. That last fact caught him off guard when she mentioned it casually in one of her early letters. He was split in thinking it was a good sign she was bringing up sex with him and in thinking that perhaps she was disfigured or genophobic.
Sally seemed to have a watertight alibi for still holding her V card, though. She’d battled cancer for the early part of her adulthood before being taken in by a religious cult who claimed they could heal her. Whether they were the cause of her triumphant recovery or not is debatable, but she was still alive and had been in remission for 18 years.
Sally was in the cult into her mid-thirties and believed sex was for procreation only and didn’t believe in procreation in a world as damned as ours. So, Sally knitted sweaters and tended to the medical needs of the other members of the cult. She had no medical training, but she had a prowess for pouring herself into the aid of others. During her 35th birthday, the leader of the cult surrounded the camp with a band of trumpets and insisted the members commit suicide. Sally was embarrassed when she revealed to Viktor that she’d actually considered it for several hours and had only come to her senses when one of the young patients she’d recently nursed back to health had shot themselves in the throat, blowing off their head in front of her.
After she left the cult, she was severely depressed and sought treatment for PTSD. She’d even spent the better part of a year at The Fairchild Institute. It was right after her time there that Viktor began sending letters. Sally’s older sister Amanda and Viktor were pen pals in elementary school. Viktor was lost. His only release was writing, but the writing felt empty with no one to read it. He found Amanda’s old address and sent out his first letter. Then he sat down and ate an almond/raspberry pastry.
Viktor never expected a response or even believed that Amanda would still be living there, but he hoped it would find it’s way into curious hands. He wrote three letters to this address before receiving his first response. It was a tender, heart-felt letter explaining that Amanda had passed two years earlier and it was her younger sister Sally now living there. Sally said she was overwhelmed by the letters and couldn’t bring herself to write back right away, but that she felt he deserved to know there was someone reading and had encouraged him to keep writing.
Viktor teared up when he read her response and he wasn’t the crying type. In fact, his last tear fell when his childhood dog, Rover, died of old age. Viktor wrote Sally faithfully every week from then on out and eventually Sally began to write back to each one.
Viktor and Sally lived (almost) their whole lives never knowing the other existed, but then they found each other and learned to love each other from words written on a thin, blue-lined page, ink blotted incongruity sealed with saliva, carried with a stamp. The grand summation of their lives would never be read in history books, no grandchild would ever hear the story of how they met, but it was enough that they had. It was enough that they had.
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