The envelope on the table had only three words on its spine in small print, in a hurry. That was her name. Nothing else. There was neither her address nor the sender's name, nor were there any stamps or postage. Nothing. Only the envelope on the table carelessly, so that he would now discover it and be surprised. He grabbed it and stared at it. He did not want to believe what he had already understood: that letter was known to him ... but no, it could not be. He tore the envelope aside and unfolded the paper that was nesting inside. The handwriting was the same as the one that had been used for his name on the face of the envelope, but inside it was untidy, even if there were words crossed out, as if the handwriting intended to remain on the outside of the envelope had been treated with care for being public while in hiding its sender had been more concerned with what he wanted to say than with the pure aesthetic image of the words. If clear, you could see the remains of that struggle in the sender to find the right words, appropriate to the feeling he wanted to convey. Feeling that, like the words that tried to lock him in, was not clear either. The reading confirmed what was guessed in the spelling: there were long paragraphs that enthusiastically tried to say something, but that something was silent all the time, so that at the end of the reading, one found himself without more information than when starting it, the only thing that one could understand was that need to say. Silence was the ruler, it was clear that the adventurous words that had wanted to say more than allowed had been killed by violent marks, that nothing had left of them other than the dark trace of their absence. And the silence accused the fact that the sender's hope was placed in that he would understand, that it was not necessary to say more, that of the minimal clues left throughout the letter he would guess the unsaid, and act accordingly. 

All this first reading had been done walking around the room, as infected by the nervousness that the sender had had when writing the letter. Once the reading was finished, he fell into a chair as if beaten. As he sat down, his arms loosened and the letter slipped from his fingers. It was long, four sheets of small, knotted print.

He closed his eyes. A thick darkness was surrounding him, covering, crushing him. Harsh presences were born from that darkness, and they bit him, and they got under his skin, and they bled him. His eyes began to burn and he brought his hands to them, to rub them. And he realized that he was crying ...

Then he opened his eyes again. Trying to calm down, he adjusted his breathing. Then he took the letter again.

Now the hands did not want to have the letter so he had to force them to hold it. And while he forced them, he tried to reread what was written, hoping that he had been wrong in his interpretation in the first reading. But that was impossible. The words that he read were the same that he had read and to his understanding they repeated what he had already understood. On top of that, his hands did not want to stay still, and they began to ache with a deep, stabbing pain, right there in his fingertips, where he held the letter. Because of this pain the letter was shaken, and the words, taking advantage, had begun to dance on the sheet. And the eyes could no longer see what was being said on the sheet, the agitated paper was becoming nothing, it was becoming a cloud. And the pain in his fingers was increasing, and it was a terrible pain, as if he were holding a plate of red-hot steel between his fingers. When he discovered this - that the paper was burning his hands - he tried to release it, but it was too late, the charred flesh had stuck to the paper. The smell of roast meat was filling the room. New tears evaporated from his face. And the fire in the hands was getting bigger and bigger, taking the rest of the body. Sitting in the chair he was consumed in living flame.