A Letter of Soot

Alternatively “A Letter to Nowhere From a Man I Never Met,” was published in the June 2025 publication of Le Phare Collective, by Línea Recta.

Dear nowhere,

I find myself at odds with the pools of thoughts that barricade me from feeling with my fingers as I wrap myself in the tasks and chores of a man who scrapes filth from above the fire, and all the same my joints will creak like any other old codger who sweeps chimneys for a living but my mind keeps turning like cogs do in an engine. I had long grown accustomed to these pools, but no longer. A seed has been planted deep in my brain, and roots have begun to sprout from underneath my nails. To know me well, and to know then that I speak the words of truth to you, you must know me from all others. You must know that soot has become my name over many decades, and my hands are turned black on the palms like an old shoe. You must know that I feel used, but in a good way. In the way that an olive feels used when it slides down your throat in the form of oil. Perhaps all this pressure over the years has just squished out my mind, and I can’t think at all about what used to ail me, but in my new oily state all seems to be as it always has been and I question if my existence is but the thought of a passing chap who considers me lightly on the roof of his neighbor before going on to work. Have I ever been anything else but soot? A spot of soot come to clean up the rest of the soot and march on home to read his soot books and drink his soot tea? A fleeting thought for most, but I had found for myself that all I know is fleeting thought, and that that is what I truly am. I have been fleeting for more years than anyone could bother to count; seeping juice into my sooty suit and draining my beard of black liquid in the gutter. When an old man spits at your feet you do not question him for the time, you simply forget he exists, and I suppose in this way I have also lost track of it, and so I know not the time I have left to write you this, for the only time I am left to know is time kept by the eternal watch of the sky. The sun rises, and the sun sets. Some days I am in a chimney when it rises and I bleed from my eyes when I come out. Some days I am in a chimney when it sets, and I wonder where the soot ends and the night sky begins. In a place with so many chimneys, a man of my position is never out of a job, but when he looks to the sky he sees naught but the vestige that carried his precious soot to the walls of that chimney, hanging above him in a great fashion, its black belly weeping and undulating in the foul-smelling air. I dare not glance out the window, pressing my shoulder to the winter's cold pane, for my worries would bend the glass and my eyes would tear up as they drifted irrestrainably upward, unable to evict themselves from that great bird in the sky; she who kills me, she who knows my true name and has stolen it from my lips. She that I beg for life. Her roost is in my mind, as she is my matron and I am her slave. To sweep chimneys is to clear the roads, and a clear road leads the matron to ride out once more, her black stallion galloping on a billow. This is why I do not look out the window, not now not ever. In fear, and lost in thought, I cannot find it in myself to feel the paper across which I rake my pen, not for the life of... The pools are in my way. One of untrained eye might be so bold as to proclaim to me, in the fashion of one who wishes to win in a court battle, that I simply have cried too many tears for fear of the matron, and that my pages are filled and wet with the salt of my eyeballs, but he would be wrong and conversely I would be in no state to reach my hopeful hand through the curtain towards your blank and empty light. These pools are pools of thought. When you're a man of my position, there comes out of the earth a great silence, a silence that permeates through the cobblestones and drives the people walking past you to the other end of the lane. No one knows the silence I feel, for they are unwise to the breaking of it, as am I to their doing so. The thoughts of soot are black, the black of soot is thought. This I know for when I am lost in thought as I so often find myself to be — for which I write to you now — I leak soot to the walls as I clean them. But, it is in this soot-thought that I, recently, found, carved in the black, my destiny. It read as follows: "NO WH ER E." This is the seed that has grown. I have connected the pieces in my mind, I have grown the tree from the seed. I know that I can be free. This is why I have drawn the blinds, and this is why I have lowered the curtains, and this is why I write in the dark to you, a woman called nowhere who knows how to get around the bends and into the cracks, a woman called nowhere who knows how to escape the watchful eyes of the matron. She needs me, for I feed her ever-growing belly. Her black billows of ash, her sagging weight of black smoke and burned coal. Even now I can hear her spies cawing at the window pane, cold with winters touch. They scratch at the glass, THEY EVEN CALL MY NAME! I am not safe here. For this I write with haste, and as my pen screams across the path please hear my words quick and send a horse for me, I will wait by the dawn in my chimney suit and with my eyes outstretched. You will know me by my frail old stature and my hat. I must get to you, nowhere, I must find you quick as I can. The matron seeks to think my mind to mush.

Please, come quickly,

• Soot