When you arrive from school today, the doorman will give you the key to the home and this letter. I will not be there because something that every body has decided to consider urgent, has required my presence, basically because of my camera. Apparently, there has been a rebellion of girls' your age in a little village that is usually peaceful and that is called Guonderly. Quicky, badly, and I suppose with the inevitable transformations suffered by news when it goes vertiginously from here to there and there to there and so on, as usually happens when we let time dominate everything, I have been informed that those girls _that undoubtedly, to have made such a racket must be a huge army_, and still not knowing how they managed it, have taken over City Hall, the Church, the Hospital and the School, gagging all the chiefs and other powerful and important people they found on their way. It is even rumored that there is a Queen-girl and a Duchess-girl among them that, besides being the most obese, have the most surprising crazy ideas: for instance, the Queen summoned all the villages gardeners to cut all the tree's trunks of a thick forrest and, in the least time possible, plant Dutch tulips while she stuffed herself with hundreds of slices of buttered toast served, as she requested, on trays carried by servants that were forced to walk crouching. The Duchess had the idea of requiring the immediate presence of all the village boys, including crying babies, that she proceeded to lock up in a pigsty, I don't know if to learn the language of pigs or for what. It is said this strange girls' rebellion started when the moon was smiling in the sky and Miss Dina Er's cat, a widow that makes a living selling the mushrooms she grows thanks to the secret formula of her dead husband, purred in a so particular way that it could be translated into the dialect of Guonderly in no time at all. Well, it is better I part, carrying as usual my photographic tools, and see with my own well-opened eyes if once more it is confirmed that there's no smoke without fire. I will bring you what I obtain from my wise camera after having a look at Guonderly's rebellion so that you can judge for yourself. I suppose I will be away for three to four hours. If you count them it is not too much. Look: just four or five fingers out of the more than a dozen ones that I suppose you have. However, if you count them in seconds, even doing it quicly with the calculator, you will see that the resulting number is much more than your own finger's plus my own plus your grandmother's plus your uncle's... but if you want a piece of advice, don't let the length of any number overwhelm you, not even when the cheeky figures have decided to give you a headache. Well, the case is that this quartet or quintet of hours in which I will be calming the matter's urgency would be for the people a lot of seconds. You know, seconds succeed each other circularly in the clock, they are comdemned to this unbreakable orbit invented by I don't know who. Fortunatelly, as there is a bit of everything in the world, there was also someone who had the idea of trying to find out what would happen if that orbit were breakable. I think that this person stole a pair of scissors from the sewing basket of his or her ant's neighbour with which he or she cut firmly and silently the seconds' orbit. The seconds, of course, in the same way that the yellow bird would flee if it suddenly found the cage door open, did not have any doubt about availing themselves of the opportunity to start flying and discovering what for them was the unknown, and to do it before someone too serious found out what had happened and decided to continue with their job, their honorable job, their monotonous and boring job, the job of giving the time at all times and to all those people who wanted to know it. And do you know what the seconds that fled the clock did? Well, just what you have in your hands. After this letter that I have prepared for you so that you are entertained, there is a book you can read in less than twenty thousand seconds, but I assure that if you pay attention to the words you will not even notice the seconds. While you will slide down the geographical features of the words _sometimes as exaggerated as the Red-Coloured Canyon_ you will undestand what I've been trying to say: that each word and every one of them and all of them together are the fortunate host of seconds, the ones that were released from their life sentence of circulating and circulating. Maybe you will want to know who the hell had the idea of this prank. A prank that could be played by a child that has run away from school and that soon or later will be punished. Do you know what the word aterdultyified* means? Precisely, it was an aterdultyified who managed to play the prank of confusing the world by tempting some seconds to adopt a life-style that was less boring than the one in the clock. Well darling, I have to go if I don't want to miss the train. Oh! Now I don't remember if it left at 16:37 or seven minutes later, or even if it has already left. I have to fly if I want to get there on time. I leave you this kiss.
A kiss. As always, Em.
P.S.: And most of all, I hope that looking at this beautiful book, your anger will disappear and not finding me at home as every afternoon to pamper you perhaps too much.
* aterdultyified: adult + terryified.
(Trad. N. Kerrigan)