"The first letter came from a city named Amaranth, a city of sakura trees, where the architecture has all been replaced by carefully cultivated saplings woven together into buildings, bridges, balconies, blossoming beautifully in the spring. The smell is intoxicatingly sweet, heavy in the nose, burning your hairs, and every surface is carpeted with pink petals gathered up by children wielding rakes and baskets. I was told that the flowers are cooked into syrups and sauces that are the city's prized export, and one spoonful of roseate water would tell you why.
"What does it taste like? A newborn dawn, the memory of waking up for the first time, pooling floral sweetness over your tongue. I bought a bottle to take with me. Though I only drank half of it; the rest of it— Well. That is a different story.
"I got lost quickly, in the maze of flowers, but the passerby were kind enough to give me good directions—which ladders to climb, which turns to take—and soon enough I arrived at the address. One of many homes woven out of wood and blossoms, high enough for a ladder and low enough to climb it. A single knock was all it took for the door to open; I wondered if they'd been waiting.
"There was a young man behind the door. He had a broom in one hand and a hat in the other. I think he had opened the door with his foot. He looked. Surprised. It made me think that yes, he had been waiting. Just not for me.
"'Delivery,' I said, and gave the young man a letter. I still remember that letter: rough, thick paper, the kind that feels homemade, big loopy ink scrawling. I try my best to remember those things. 'Is this your name?'"
"He stared at it for the longest time. That image is frozen in my mind's eye: the flowers in his hair, the petals on his feet. How he'd almost let go of the broom, and the straw bristles matted with crushed cherry blossoms.
"'No," he'd finally said. 'That's my brother.'
"I apologized, of course—it was one of my earlier deliveries, and I was horribly embarrassed at having made such a mistake. I then asked if he could point me in the direction of his brother. He laughed at that. It was . . . a strange sound, his laugh. Something sweet and soft as the flowers the people of Amaranth were so drunk on.
"'I'll take it, in his place,' he told me, to which I was hesitant. It was his brother's letter, after all, but. Well. The way he laughed had told me a story. So I gave it to him, after extracting a promise to give it to the intended recipient when he could. That made him laugh again. And then he asked, 'Who is it from?', and when I told him—because I try to remember the people who give me letters, I am a professional—he had laughed again. A different laugh this time. 'Oh, Mom,' he said. 'It's good to know she's still out there.' And then he said, 'Give me just a moment,' and disappeared back inside. I gave him more than a moment—almost an hour, just standing there, feeling a bit silly sometimes when neighbors saw me and looked suspicious about what I was doing there, an outsider, waiting at an empty open doorway. But he eventually came out. He was holding a letter of his own.
'"She should know,' he told me. I don't know why, it's not like I have any authority in that matter. I'm just the deliverer. But he was very uncertain, and in any case these letters are the whole point of me, so I assured him yes, she will know, I would make sure of it.
"This is the letter I brought to the Panopticon, for the mother who waited three levels deep. It took me a week to receive approval for visitation. I remember— She looked nothing like her son. Or at least, nothing like the one I met. No broom, no hat, no petals. Different hair. She sounded like him, though; when she laughed, it was the broken glass crumble of Parole, but there was a resonance that reminded me of Amaranth's perfume. She didn't read the letter while I was there, just held it close in thin gray hands and thanked me for coming such a long way.
"Sometimes, I wonder what that letter said. If it said anything about her other son. What it would have said about her other son."
