A Circus Among the Stars

To the audience at the tent flap,

Dear audience, please take your seats: tonight's show opens on a cold day in 1987, near a space facility in the north of the Soviet Union, under a tent hung with star charts.

The envelope is cream paper. A line of thick slab-serif capitals, ornate and joyful, curves along its baseline like the name of an act on a poster. Teal planets wear their rings, burgundy big-top arcs trace orbits, and there are gold star charts and a perforated ticket corner. The printing sits a little crooked, the lithographic ink darker in one patch than another, which only makes it more endearing.

In orbit everything grows light, acrobats included. A writer fond of paradox said: "Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly." — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)

Serious matters we leave to the instruments. In this letter you may take yourself lightly, like a performer. Welcome in; any seat will do, and the show does not close for rain.

See you in the interval

Storm Post Office

1987 · Plesetsk