Dear Nobody: A Letter Game

A war you never see. A love that exists only on paper. A pen that has started to answer back. You are a woman at a censor's desk, far behind a nameless front. Across your desk pass the letters of two strangers — pen-pals who have never once met, who know each other only through the words they send. You hold a stamp, a pen, and a book of regulations, and it is your work to strike out anything a soldier must not know. But these two have nothing but the letters. Their entire relationship is the paper on your desk. So the choice is never abstract: cross out a line and it is gone from their love, not just from the page. Keep a tenderness in and you let it reach the other side. Strike it and you have decided, quietly, that it never existed. Then something begins to go wrong with the correspondence. A letter answers a question you only asked with your pen. A line you struck weeks ago comes…