Emily

A friend gave me an old handmade book as a gift.
She said the book had been in Emily Dickinson’s house, and she had always kept it within reach.
I looked at the cover… it was too stained and battered to read what was on it.
So, I opened it carefully…
It was a volume of poems I’d never seen published before.
And they were terrible. Really awful.
Completely unlike anything Emily Dickinson had ever written.
“Oh, she didn’t write this book,” she said. “She used it to swat bugs and spiders. She was horribly afraid of the damned things.”