Stick kept going back to check, and each time the envelope was softer, grubbier, still unread. And then the weekend after he’d left it, it disappeared. Stick climbed up onto the window ledge to make sure. No letter. It meant nothing, he told himself. Some scumbag had probably found it and would start texting him porn any minute. Or a bird had picked it up in its beak and dropped it somewhere. Stick straddled his legs over the sill and peered left then right but couldn’t see the envelope. And then he saw the piece of glass sat on top of the half-brick. Not just any piece of glass, but one of those that has been smoothed off by the sea, all the sharp edges gone, the surface scuffed by sand into a pale, opaque green. He was going soft in the head. But still he pocketed the glass, and when he got home he put it on the table in his room next to the writing paper with the zebra pattern, and then he picked it up and held it in his left hand as he wrote another letter.
