Hate Mail

by Donna Marchetti

Dear Naomi, You sound really boring. My mom says that Oklahoma is in the middle of the bible belt, and you’ll probably end up pregnant at sixteen.

Dear Luca, Your handwriting is terrible. I couldn’t even understand what you wrote in your letter. It kind of looks like you said that you have five cats of your own, and your favorite thing to do on the weekends is clean their litterboxes. That seems a little weird. You should probably stop drinking so much salt water. Maybe it’s a good thing I live far from the ocean after all.

I’m sorry to hear that your parents are brother and sister. I’ve heard that incest can cause a lot of birth defects, which explains why you turned out the way you did.

If we’re lucky, a tornado will destroy your house and keep your parents from breeding more of your kind.

I feel like I should let you know that my parents are not brother and sister. I think it’s kind of weird that you even thought of that. You must have some pretty disgusting fantasies. I hope that you don’t have any brothers or sisters, but if you do, they probably wouldn’t want to touch you with a ten-foot pole. You have an ugly personality, and I bet you’re just as ugly on the outside too.

you probably shouldn’t lay out on the beach, because someone might mistake you for a whale. Next thing you know, a whole crowd of people will be around you, trying to help push you back into the ocean.

“Your penemy,” she repeats. “Get it? Like a pen pal, but he’s your enemy. Pen enemy. Penemy.”

Dear Luca, I hope that you wake up tomorrow morning with a small hangnail, and when you pick at it, it just gets bigger and more painful. I hope that it bothers you so much that you just keep picking at it, but it doesn’t come off, and you end up pulling a really long sliver of skin off your finger. Then I hope it gets infected, and the only solution is to amputate your whole hand. That would really make my day. Love, Naomi

Now you can’t remember the good times without also remembering the way that he left, how he wouldn’t even look at you or tell you that he loved you, because he didn’t.

“Good thing you’re a meteorologist and not a veterinarian, then,” he says. “You’re right. I can’t go home and eat a hurricane.”

I would invite you to come see for yourself, but I imagine even the friendly folks in Georgia have standards, and they’d know better than to smile at someone like you. In fact, you’d probably put the whole state in a bad mood, and no one out here would ever smile again.

hope that you accidentally wear an outfit the same color as the green screen behind you during your next weather report, and it looks like you’re just a decapitated head floating around the screen. Something like that would make your boring show a lot better.

Dear Naomi, A million microscopic bugs live inside these flowers, and when you smell them, all the bugs will get sucked up into your nostrils and eat away at your cartilage until you don’t have a nose anymore. Xoxo, Luca

“I like seeing you,” he says. “All of you.”

“Do you really think you’re the only one who’s hurting over this? I fell in love with you, and I lost you.”

I told Naomi that I dodged a bullet, but maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m the bullet.

Dear Naomi, Someone mistook you for a monkey, which doesn’t surprise me. That’s why they left you the bananas.

By the way, what kind of name is Naomi Light? It sounds like a weird superhero made up by a guy who hasn’t had a haircut in 3 years, and uses nail clippers to trim his split ends. Love, Luca