Ella Minnow Pea

by Mark Dunn

  Nollopville

  Wednesday., August 30

  Dear Sister Gwennnetttte:

  Robbed of two letters, I now chooooose to overuuuse the twenty-four which remaaaain.

  I hope you and Amos are well. I haven’t been feeeeeeling myself lately. Tassie worrrrrrries about me. Sheee shouldn’t.

  I will bounce back as I always do do do do do do do do do do do.

  Love,

  Your Sister Mittieeeeeeeeeee

  Savannah, Georgia

  U.S.A.

  Friday, September 1

  Dear Ms. Purcy,

  My name is Nathaniel Warren. I am a Masters candidate in history and sociology at the University of Georgia. I am also publisher and editor of a new academic journal Nollopiana with publication of its first issue slated for later this fall. As you might guess, my journal is exclusively devoted to your island, its people, and its unusual history.

  Last week I was contacted by someone you know: a young man by the name of William Creevy. Mr. Creevy had heard of my publication and wondered if I might like to write about his recent expulsion. He is presently without income and says he could benefit from any compensation I might offer. I agreed, but soon came to see that another more broadly encompassing article begs to be written.

  Through my lifelong interest in Nollop I have gained a level of familiarity with your country that has until now been matched by only a handful of Americans and Nollopian expatriates. That interest has fueled a desire to learn as much as I can about your island, and to share what I learn with others. In light of recent events, this mission has become much easier. Lately, Americans have started to take much closer notice of their tiny neighbor to the southeast. In fact, I estimate that if these strange edicts erupting from your high council continue, the whole world may soon be demonstrating a rubbernecking interest in your plight. I have already made a number of advanced subscription sales to residents of the coastal tidelands whose number now includes a growing community of Nollopian émigrés.

  Now to my reason for writing: I would like to come to Nollop for a lengthy visit, for purposes of investigating this odd, unprecedented political and social crisis in which you now find yourself embroiled. Since my interest in Nollop has been hidden to some degree by the veil of academia, my name and face may not be known to the Council, and so my application for short-term visa may stand a chance for approval. I know that the Council has, since Statute 24-37, refused entry to all American journalists and scholars. (All the news of the latest goings-on has come from those who have involuntarily – or in an increasing number of cases, voluntarily – left the island.) As an added precaution I will assume, with your permission, the role of “old friend of the family.” Mr. Creevy reports that you and your daughter have remained in Council favor, and so I’m hopeful that such a visit won’t raise governmental objections.

  I know that I am asking much from you; I am, after all, a total stranger to the two of you. (And yet from Mr. Creevy’s descriptions of you both, I do feel that I know you somewhat. I understand that some of Mr. Creevy’s happiest childhood moments were spent in your company – with you as his second grade teacher and your daughter Natassa as his middle school English tutor.)

  I will certainly understand if you have reservations, and if those reservations prevent you from allowing me to stay. (If this turns out to be the case I trust that you will divulge to no one the fact that I approached you in this regard.) But if you feel as many of your fellow islanders do, that the actions of the Council should be brought to the light of public scrutiny with my earnest little journal serving as appropriate vehicle, perhaps your convictions might outweigh any misgivings you may have about the reason for and the manner of my visit.

  I look forward to your response.

  Sincerely,

  Nate Warren

  Nollopville

  Monday, September 4

  (American Labor Day)

  Dear Mr. Warren,

  I have discussed your petition with my daughter Tassie. She has allayed my minor concerns, and so I am able to hereby welcome you to our home as “good old friend of the family.” I look forward to hearing if your application for visa will be approved. Please let us know if there is anything we can do to help.

  Best wishes,

  Mittie Purcy

  Nollopville

  Monday, September 4

  Dear Cousin Ella,

  Mother is better, buoyed somewhat by the strangest letter we received last week, from a gentleman named Nate Warren who publishes a journal about Nollop. He wants to write an article for American readership on the Council’s actions of late, and for this purpose has asked if he might come to stay with Mother and me. Mother immediately wrote him back to say yes, by all means. I have never known her to act so hastily in any regard!

  I must say that I am rather looking forward to the young man’s visit.

  With love,

  Your cousin Tassie

  Nollopville

  Wednesday, September 6

  Dear Tassie,

  I am excited to learn of your soon-to-be house-guest. Anything to boost Aunt Mittie’s foundering spirits, and yours as well!

  Perhaps, by now, you have heard of the tragic public flogging of the Rasmussen family – all six members whipped like misbehaving canines on the public green as was their choice following the soon to be infamous Daffy and Donald affair.

  Their offense? Each member in deliberate provocation of the High Island Council had marched single file into last Tuesday’s open session wearing cartoon masks and making loud duck sounds – sounds which any sentient Nollopian knows by now are forbidden – while holding aloft large cardboard

  containers of a certain recently outlawed brand of American oatmeal.

  As the Rasmussens were being manacled by members of the L.E.B., Council Member Willingham asked for the reason behind such a flagrant flouting of the “clear and unambiguous” law against use of the seventeenth letter – a flouting made all the more “pernicious” by the enthusiastic abandon with which it was embraced. The head of the Rasmussen household, Charles Rasmussen, Sr., a clothing merchant here in town, (I bought a lovely powder blue lace partete from his store just last month.) responded, “It was actually my children’s idea. They are very fond of this letter and felt a protest against its removal from island discourse was very much in order. My wife and I agree. We also wish to be flogged in the presence of as many town residents as choose to be in attendance. And if this produces no outcry – especially the laying of leather tassel upon the youthful backs of my nine-year-old twin daughters Becka and Henrietta – then please trundle us without delay from this island of cringe and cowardice, for we no longer wish to belong to such a despicable confederacy of spinal-defectives.”

  And so Mum and Pop and I stood and watched the harrowing and loathsome sight of children being ritually beaten, and the commensurately disturbing picture of frightened onlookers – “the town-baa-baas,” as Pop has taken to calling our dear neighbors – doing what they do oh so very well, and that is: absolutely nothing. Lifting not even the proverbial finger to remove these high council bastinado-benediced buffoons from their pinnacle of abusive power, nor doing anything otherwise to stop or decelerate their efforts. Watched these Nollopimpotents, Mum and Pop and I did, as they stood in willful immotility. And as we absorbed, in full, the lamentable scene being played out before us, we found ourselves entertaining identical thoughts – concretious thoughts of retaliation and the ultimate reclamation of a society so disturbingly transmogrified.

  A first meeting to be held in our home a week from tomorrow under the guise of Pop’s twice-monthly poker game. To plot and plan our insurrection – our nascent underground movement to restore a full twenty-six letter alphabet to the people – deserving or not – of this, our presently polluted island home!

  Even as this morning – in the early predawn darkness one Creighton O’Looley was discovered attempting to replace a tile newly fallen. He was apprehended
and is being held without bond for attempting to circumvent this most recent misconstrual of all-holy decree from the great and omniscient Nollop.

  J. –

  It could have been worse.

  But J!

  As you might say: Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!

  Love you. Love to your mother.

  Ella

  Savannah, Georgia

  U.S.A.

  Friday, September 8

  Dear Ms. Purcy,

  My application for visa has been approved and I will be arriving Monday, September 18, at Pier Four in Nollopton on the 4:12 Walmart supply boat. If it isn’t convenient for you or your daughter to meet me, I will find my own way up to your home in Nollopville. (It shouldn’t be difficult. I spent my childhood studying maps of your island.) As I understand the internal mainway is mired this time of year, don’t expect me until late.

  I have just received word about the loss of the tile containing the letter “j” and do not wish to wait until I see you to share important news. Chemists here in Georgia who have obtained smuggled chips from the two earlier fallen tiles have just completed an exhaustive battery of chemical analyses on the fixative that has held the tiles in place for the last hundred years. Their assessment is that the glue – a strange compound not familiar to them – glue which also oddly, and we now know impractically served as a substitute for simple, durable cement – has calcified to the point of ineffectual granule and powder. Within months, perhaps even weeks, all of the tiles currently mounted on the cenotaph will become similarly loosened and fall to the ground. The chemists doubt that within a year’s time there will be even a single tile left affixed to the monument. Should your council continue along its present course, the outcome will be too dire even to contemplate. Here I am telling you nothing you don’t already know.

  (I am, as you can also imagine, fast losing my academic objectivity; word of the Rasmussens’ ordeal reached us this morning.)

  While researching the series of articles I now plan to write on the Council’s recent actions and the tangible effects those actions are having upon the residents of Nollop, I seek, in addition to your hospitality and safe cover, assistance from you in reaching that one member of the Council you feel most open to reading the chemists’ report, and making a case for a reversal of these apocalyptic directives.

  It is, I believe, well worth a try.

  Sincerely,

  Nate Warren

  Nollopville

  Sunday, September 10

  Dear Ella,

  Most wonderful news. Mr. Warren, who will be arriving on the 18th, is coming to our rescue! I know it’s foolish to put stock in any promises of assistance (and while I hope that your underground meetings prove independently fruitful, I cannot count on them – forgive my blunt honesty here – and must parcel my optimism in such a way as to best contribute to the state of my emotional health) but I am nonetheless encouraged by the following: Warren arrives bearing more than simply suitcase and notebook. He brings, as well, the results of chemical analyses performed on slivers of the errant tiles – analyses which prove beyond doubt and wanton denial that the tiles are falling for the simple reason that they can longer hold themselves to the bandiford. It is as elementary as that. Nollop is not God. Nollop is silent. We must respect that silence and make our decisions and judgments based upon science and fact and simple old-fashioned common sense – a commodity absent for too long from those in governmental elevatia, where its employ would do us all much good.

  I seek your assistance, dearest cousin, in determining which of the pious five would be most open to reading Mr. Warren’s report. I think, perhaps, it should be Mr. Lyttle. He has always seemed to me the least moronic of the bunch. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, Mother voted for the man many years ago for this very reason.

  Rush me in tomorrow morning’s post, dear Cousin, your much anticipated opinion in the matter. And good luck with tonight’s meeting. Please don’t interpret my lack of active endorsement as a dismissal of your family’s admirable efforts. I’m afraid I am becoming more and more the selective cynic. Thankfully, now and then I do see glimmers of hope. And Mr. Warren has just unveiled such a glimmer.

  I am looking forward to my upcoming visit with you and Aunt Gwenette and Uncle Amos. Let me know when it would be most convenient for me to come down.

  Mother sends her love.

  Tassie

  THE OFFICE OF HIGH COUNCIL

  Nollopton

  Monday, September 11

  Greetings, Nollopians:

  It has come time for the Council to make its position clear and direct with regard to the issue of the fallen tiles. Indeed, our last three executive sessions were devoted exclusively to this task. The product of those sessions is this letter which we now post to every family on the island in an effort to bring us to common mind on this, the most pressing matter ever brought before our people. It is a matter with which each member of this body has tuss-and-tangled. Late into the night have we searched our souls, into the wee smalls have we plumbed our hearts with profound and intensured moral rectilitude. Because a formidable duty has been charged to us, an overtitious ask-me-now posed, yea posited, which we cannot in good conscience ignore. And in the answer, in the noble venture of compliance, our mission now comes to encompass the putting forth to all of you, the good people of this proud and independent island nation, the reasons behind what at times must seem a harsh and unwavering capitulation to the wishes of Almighty Nollop. This we do. We do willingly; we do dutifully.

  Some, including those malcontents and apostates who have since departed our shores, might wish to modify the word “wishes” in the previous paragraph by the term “perceived.” As if everything passed down to you from Council Assembly has been based upon supposition – upon meandering hypothesis and amorphous conjecture.

  It is none of these things.

  The signs have been presented to us, and while it took us a while to ascertain the desired course rising from their assignment, we now, we are happy to say, and with only temporary delay, securely grasp and freely endorse without temperage these pathfinders dropped, literally, at our feet.

  For those of you who desire explication, we offer the following ten salients:

  Nollop was a man of words.

  We are a people of words.

  All that we are, we owe to Nollop.

  His will be done.

  We have become unfortunate victims of our own complacency.

  Complacency is a destructive force, capable of ending through invidious stagnationality all that is good which we have created for ourselves here.

  The falling tiles can represent only one thing: a challenge – a summons to bettering our lot in the face of such deleterious complacency, and in the concomitant presence of false contentment and rank self-indulgence.

  There is no room for alternative interpretation.

  Interpretation of events in any other way represents heresy.

  Heretics will be punished, as was, for example, Mr. Nollop’s saucy stenographer, who was cashiered for flippantly announcing to her employer the ease with which she could, herself, create such a sentence as his.

  Those of you who see undue cruelty in the penalties meted out for speaking or writing the forbidden letters should make note of the following three points:

  Adhering to the commandments of Nollop leaves no room for fear of punishment or forfeiture. (He who walks in the light has no reason to fear the darkness.)

  There is no such thing as accident or misspeak, only grossly under-applied discoursal perspicacity, with unguarded exposure to distractional digression. (A lighted path is clear. There is no reason, save mischief or inattention, to stray into the darkness.)

  The severity of punishment is an irrelevant issue, given the opportunity to avoid punishment altogether. (Keep to the path to avoid what is promised to be a broken and jagged shoulder.)

  Returning to the saucy secretary: she was given fair warning by Nollop that her insubordin
ate speech would not be tolerated. That one of such intellectual inferiority could ever in a lifetime duplicate the work of Nollop was unfathomable, her claim hypercomical. Nollop said as much, even challenged the pert stenographer to come up with a sentence of her own measuring thirty-five letters or less and containing all of the letters of the alphabet.

  She tried.

  She failed.

  In fact, the best that she could muster was a short anecdote about an imaginary animal park in which the occupants revolted by exchanging their stripes and spots. It ran precisely 289 letters.

  She used the word yak three times.

  The secretary, we might further add, was never able to come up with a sentence matching Nollop’s because it simply cannot be done. This is what has given Nollop his preeminence. Omnipotent. Omniscient. Omniglorious.

  Praise Nollop.

  And honor his wishes by removing “J” with jubilation.

  Sincerely,

  Your High Council

  Gordon Willingham

  La Greer Houston

  Harton Mangrove

  Rederick Lyttle

  A. Plastman

  4

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