E

A second minimal correspondence has been received in the same calendar day, by the same channel, forwarded in isolation: a single lowercasee. Where the previous arrival distinguished itself by having nothing to lean on, this one distinguishes itself by having nowhere to stand that is not already occupied. The letter is the fifth of the alphabet, and at an observed 12.7% of written English it is the most frequently used letter in the language. Examiners confirm it arrived lowercase, unpunctuated, and alone — technically. They note, with some embarrassment, that the intake form for this event was drafted before the letter arrived, and that a substantial fraction of the drafting already contained additional es.

Storage has been reconsidered. The previous letter is held stem-up in a padded slot, preserved against attempted ascent to uppercase, checked at fifteen-minute intervals. The e declines the arrangement: there is no slot that does not already contain it. The slot is lined with the wordpadded. The storage form is headed storage. The fifteen-minute checksheet is checked, with some dignity, for its own sake. The observatory's report on the letter e is approximately eleven per cent of a file harder to type than it needs to be, the letter doing the work of recording its own near-ubiquity at near-ubiquity's customary rate. It is, examiners concede, the least alone thing the office has ever been asked to hold.

In this office's line of work — the taxonomy of vocal escalation, the measurement of the scream — e has a long and slightly insulting track record. As the silent final e it is written but produces no phonation; it changes the word it sits behind without saying a thing about itself. The previous arrival was quieter than the floor of the Vocal Escalation Index, and the office filed it anyway, at full ceremony. This arrival does not even pretend to make the sound that would let the office take it seriously as voice. The office logs the silence, files the letter, and declines to comment on the possibility that it is now holding the alphabet's least vocal member and the alphabet's most common member simultaneously.

A Poised-Prefix Registry is not maintained for this letter. The registry for the d worked because d stood in front of a graspable set of candidates — do,done, don't,dear, dispatch — and the office could hold the top four in suspense. E stands in front of approximately the entire language. Ranking e-completions would be ranking the language itself, an act no office at this observatory is chartered for. The e is therefore classified not as a poised prefix but as a harmless-sounding term of art the office has invented on the spot: a distributed presence. Examiners note, and will not be drawn further, that the previous arrival's registry held exactly one candidate beginning with d-e — dear, ranked fourth, a salutation that never got addressed. The present letter offers the matter no comment. It rarely does.