Sam's grandmother lived a long way away. Not a bus ride away. A sea away.
They talked on the screen on Sundays, and the screen was good, but it was flat. You could not smell her kitchen through it. You could not see what she had on her table unless she picked it up and showed you.
So Sam wrote her a letter instead. A proper one, with paper and an envelope and a stamp that had to go on the right way up.
He wrote about small things, because small things are the best things to put in a letter. His wobbly tooth. The hole in his left welly. The swimming badge that had not been sewn on yet. He drew the cat, who came out looking slightly like a loaf of bread.
He posted it in the red postbox at the corner, standing on his toes to reach the slot, and let go, and heard it land.
"How long will it take?" he asked.
"Two weeks," said his mum. "Maybe three. It's going a long way round."
That night, in bed, Sam thought about his letter riding in the back of a van in the dark.
The next night he moved it on a bit. Now it was in a big grey sack with hundreds of other letters, all of them full of small things.
The night after that he put it on a plane, high over black water, with the moon out and everyone on board asleep except the pilots.
Some nights he forgot to think about it at all. Those were the nights it travelled fastest.
Then one Thursday there was an envelope on the mat with his own name on it, in handwriting that leaned to the right.
His grandmother wrote about small things too. A bird that came to the rail of her balcony every morning and shouted at her. What to do with a tooth once it comes out, which is to keep it in a tin. And she had a swimming badge of her own once, a long time ago, and her mother had not sewn it on either.
At the bottom she had written: "This letter has come a long way from home, and so have I. Look after it."
Sam slept with it under his pillow the first night. It crackled every time he moved. After that he kept it in the tin, with the tooth.
He started the next one that same evening. "Dear Grandma. The cat has learned to open the cupboard."
And when he went to bed he thought about it going the long way round. The postbox. The van. The grey sack. The plane over the black water.
And his grandmother at the other end, waiting for it, the way he had waited.
That is a good thing to think about at bedtime. Someone far away, thinking about you back.