Confession received through the anonymous form, October 2nd at 4:12 a.m. We do not know the author.
The form has been online since June 6th, 2022, at eleven at night. It has received three thousand four hundred and seventeen texts. I have published sixty-one of them. There is no reading committee, no editorial desk, no second person: there is a kitchen table eighty centimeters by sixty, on the fourth floor with no elevator, rue de l'Orillon, a laptop and me.
The form comes down to four fields. Your text. A box for the way you want it to have arrived — letter, voice, message, it doesn't matter, nobody ever ticks the right one. A checkbox saying you authorize publication. And one line, in light gray, under the send button: We never reply.
I have replied eleven times in four years and four months. I wrote out in my own hand an entire confession that arrived from nowhere. And I published my own, passing it off as another woman's, so that one single person would read it.