We first read this one several years ago and found the central conceit so bizarre we immediately liked it even though we knew we couldn’t buy it—because it wasn’t yet a fully realized story. We challenged Trent to make it work and he sent us at least three or four iterations that never seemed to work. Then, in the fullness of time, we received this current version by Trent and his pal Brian. The alchemy of a collaborator and all our critiques and suggestions had worked its magic, allowing us to present you with what follows.
It started a few weeks ago when Leonard Perry received two pieces of mail that were not addressed to him. One was a letter to a Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio, the other a booklet of coupons for a Kenneth Hunt in Miami. Leonard lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and, odd as it was, he didn’t think much of it at the time. He tossed the coupons into the trash and on the letter he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER”, then put the letter back into his mailbox, raised the mailbox’s flag, and forgot about it.
The next day when he arrived home from work he opened his mailbox and found five pieces of mail wrongly delivered to him. One of the pieces was the coupon book for Kenneth Hunt in Miami, Florida, another the letter to Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio. The Ohio letter was addressed in the exact same handwriting it had been the previous day; only, his own handwriting of “RETURN TO SENDER” was no longer there.
He did what he’d done the day before. Tossed the coupons into the trash and on the four letters—Mary F. Stodgel’s included—he wrote “RETURN TO SENDER”.
The next day there were seven pieces and nothing at all addressed to him. In these seven pieces of mail, the five he’d received the previous day were all included, his “RETURN TO SENDER” handwriting, once again, gone.
What he did this time, rather than writing “RETURN TO SENDER” on all six letters, was tear them twice in half and, along with Kenneth Hunt’s coupons, stuff the pieces into the garbage.
He finished up late at work the next day. His mind swam with numbers and sums, and every time he closed his eyes he was still crunching them. It had been Stress Central the entire day.
Just before he left his office, Julie knocked on the doorjamb and stepped in. Julie worked in accounting down the hall and had also just finished up for the night. She asked Leonard if he wanted to get a drink. It was no secret that Julie had liked him for a long time. And it was no secret that Heather, Leonard’s girlfriend, was out of town, visiting family in Upstate New York for the whole month. She’d only been gone a week at this time.
Leonard said “no, thank you”; he just wanted to go home and space out in front of the television.
With the day being what it was, when he got home he didn’t even think about what had been going on with his mail. He opened the box and found two glassy brown eyes staring at him, and a tiny set of white, glistening teeth.
He slammed the box and turned away as his heart picked up a pace and needles prickled the back of his neck. After a couple deep, steadying breaths, Leonard turned back to the box and tapped the side of it. Nothing stirred within. Slowly, he eased the mailbox open again. The eyes and teeth were really there. They were part of a rat. An unmoving though very real, very dead rat.
After a moment of incomprehension, he went back to his car and grabbed a short stack of fast-food napkins from his glove box. With a sick gurgling in his stomach, he removed the rat, and when he did, some of the mail fell to the ground. Faceup, the letter on top of the fallen stack was a letter to a Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio.
Leonard disposed of the rat, gathered up the mail, and took it all inside. He read the addresses over and over again. There were twelve pieces all together, seven of them being the mail he’d received yesterday. The mail he’d torn up and thrown into his trash. There was nothing at all addressed to him. He went to his trash can and dug through it. The letters he’d torn up and thrown away were not there.
He hadn’t done anything that he knew of to cause this. The mail just kept coming in. The same mail. The exact-same mail.
Could it be a joke?
Unlikely, he decided. None of his friends had this type of sense of humor. None of them were clever enough to execute such an elaborate scheme. And what would be the purpose of a joke like this, anyway? It didn’t make sense.
As a kid Leonard had found a thrill in knowing when the mail arrived. “The mail’s here!” he’d scream to his parents, a tingle of excitement oscillating through him. When he got old enough, he loved running down the driveway and opening the box. Every time he felt the remnants of magic as he withdrew things from all over the world sent to his family, like Santa Claus leaving presents.
As time went by, packages, letters, and junk mail came delivered to him. It didn’t really matter what it was. There was just something so cool and mysterious about having something come to him from far away.
As the years passed, the excitement vanished and the magic ceased. It slowly evolved into bills, the junk mail increased, and Leonard eventually came to regard it as yet another headache added to everyday life.
Now, however, it was more than just a headache. It was a downright pain in the ass, and a confusing one at that. Even in his growing concern, though, he couldn’t help finding some ironic amusement in the fact that, even if it wasn’t in the innocent childlike way it once was, the mail had become interesting again.
Leonard spent over an hour sitting at his kitchen table that night, looking over each piece. Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio; Kenneth Hunt in Miami, Florida; Liz Prince in Boston, Massachusetts; David Gwinn in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Martin Miller in Chattanooga, Tennessee; Jane Killinger in Bend, Oregon. He studied each one in turn, then restudied them. Each one that he had received the day before he took especial interest in, looking for traces of rips in the envelopes, or signs of where his writing—“RETURN TO SENDER”—had been erased. There was nothing. Each piece looked exactly how it had when he’d received it the day before. It wasn’t possible.
He considered opening them, reading them, then decided against it. A part of him was afraid to see what they’d say.
Why was he receiving this stuff? And how, when he ripped it all up and threw it away, did it come back? Why was it no longer in his trash? And why, when it came back this time, was there also a dead rat? Was that a threat of some kind? What was the threat? What was he supposed to do? Keep this mail? He wasn’t the damn post office. This was some kind of intense, irrational dream.
His telephone rang. It was Heather. “You okay? You sound a little freaked out.”
Leonard looked at the twelve pieces of mail on his kitchen table, then turned his back on them. “I’m all right,” he said, “just a long day.”
Heather was having fun but missed him and wanted to say hello. They spoke for about twenty minutes. When he hung up he saw the mail still sitting there and wondered what the hell to do about it.
That night he dreamed about the dead rat.
The next day at work he flipped through the government pages of the phone book and found the number for the main office of the US Postal Service. He asked the woman what to do if he was receiving mail for other people. The woman said if he was getting mail for someone else at his address, to write “RETURN TO SENDER, NOT AT THIS ADDRESS” on it and put it back into his mailbox. Leonard then explained that the mail being delivered was not to his address at all. It was to Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin. The woman on the other end said, using a tone normally reserved for retarded children, that this wasn’t possible. She asked for his address, and when he gave it to her he heard her punching computer keys. Nothing seemed odd, she told him, and no one else in the neighborhood or the surrounding area had made any complaints. “You might want to ask your postman about it,” she said, again in her long-suffering, indulgent tone.
When he got home that night there were eight more pieces of mail, all addressed to different places. When he took them into his house, he found the other twelve pieces still sitting on his kitchen table.
He went through the new stuff. None of it was what he’d already received. This was all new mail for him to add to his collection. Still, he studied it all. There was nothing strange about it. It was just ordinary mail, as far as he could see. Why was he randomly receiving ordinary mail?
Curiosity now getting the better of him, he opened several pieces and examined them. There was nothing strange. Just letters, bills, pre-approved credit card offers, and other typical crap.
The next day—a Saturday—he was off work. He took his breakfast and coffee to the living room and sat in front of the window, watching his mailbox, waiting for the postman to show up. He propped open his front door in order to make it easier to hear the mail truck’s approach. Every now and then people walked by his house, couples hand in hand, people with their dogs or children or both. Nobody gave his mailbox so much as a glance.
Around lunchtime he saw his neighbor across the street, an attractive woman in her early thirties, walk outside to her mailbox. She opened it, removed a small stack of mail, and spent a moment going through it before she walked back inside.
But the mailman hadn’t shown up yet. He couldn’t have. Leonard had been watching since this morning and hadn’t seen him. Probably his neighbor hadn’t picked up her mail from the day before, he thought; though something inside him felt uneasy.
Confused, hesitant, and a little scared, he walked outside, down his short driveway, and opened his mailbox. It had sixteen pieces of mail in it.
None of them were for him.
The following week he tried different experiments. He ripped up two of the letters at random and threw them away. The next day they were back in his mailbox, along with several black-widow spiders. There was more mail too.
He sent both an empty envelope and a postcard to himself, one to his home and the other to his office. Neither one arrived.
One night he slipped down the street and put several letters in someone else’s mailbox. The next day they were back in his.
He took two sick days from work and watched for the mailman. He never saw him, but the mail was delivered both days.
Every other night he talked with Heather on the phone. He never mentioned anything about his strange new hobby. It was too bizarre to explain.
He was meant to receive this mail. He didn’t know how, he didn’t know why, but this mail was intended for him. He couldn’t doubt this, and with the tricks and threats he got whenever he destroyed any of it—whenever he committed a federal offense—he knew he was meant to do something with the mail.
But what? What was he supposed to do with it? Was he really just supposed to keep it? Like some kind of dead letter office?
Then he tried something that seemed to work. He took the letter for Mary F. Stodgel, opened it, skimmed over the message from her daughter, then put it into a fresh envelope, addressed it to Stow, Ohio, slapped a stamp on it, and mailed it off.
It did not come back the next day. Lots of other random mail arrived, but nothing for Mary F. Stodgel in Stow, Ohio. Not that day or the next.
He tried this with several other pieces. None of the letters returned until the third batch he sent. The letter to David Gwinn in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned with the message “RETURN TO SENDER, NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS”. This was not in his handwriting. Leonard stared at the envelope for a long time. It was definitely the same letter he’d sent off.
Jesus Christ, he was a post office. He put this letter back into his mailbox and flipped up the little flag. With all the other mail he received the next day, it was still in there, the handwriting of “RETURN TO SENDER, NO LONGER AT THIS ADDRESS” still on it. What the hell was he supposed to be figuring out here? What in the world was he supposed to be doing?
One more idea. Along with the batch of mail he opened, restuffed, readdressed, and stamped, he placed the letter to Michigan, still in its envelope, into another envelope, addressing it to the return address in Ketchum, Idaho.
It did not come back.
For the next few days Leonard spent his time—when he wasn’t crunching numbers at work—repackaging and resending letters. The cost was getting enormous, however. Every other day he was at the real post office, buying stamps and envelopes. The coupons and advertisements, such as the booklet for Kenneth Hunt, were easy to deal with. For whatever reason, all he had to do with those was take them to the post office and explain that he’d received them by accident. When he started getting suspicious looks, he began taking them in a postal bin and leaving it on the counter when no one was looking. This seemed to do the trick. When he received his mail the next day, the previous day’s coupons and advertisements were not there.
One day he managed to finally get every piece of mail in the house repackaged and sent off and, finally, his house looked sane again. Relief fell upon him, as well as an awkward sense of accomplishment.
The next day, a Friday, he received forty-five pieces, and with desperation sweeping and scraping all over and throughout him, he brought his hands to his face and cried. Jesus, was this ever going to end? Someone, something had to be behind this. But what? Who was doing this? And how were they doing it? He felt as though he were on a treadmill, going and going but never getting anywhere. For the love of God, what the hell was he supposed to do? How in the world could he make it go away?
A thought occurred to him just then. Such a simple thought too. He went outside with a screwdriver and removed his mailbox from its post. He put it on the kitchen table as the phone rang.
Only half paying attention when a woman’s voice said, “Hi, Leonard,” he replied, “Hey, sweetie.”
But it wasn’t Heather. It was Julie.
“I like that,” Julie said. “You can call me that anytime.”
“What’s up?” Leonard asked, rubbing his temples. A headache was coming on.
“I was just wondering if you were hungry. I made too much chicken and pasta salad. I could bring some over if you want.”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Leonard looked around his kitchen, at the mailbox sitting on the table, and the forty-five letters and parcels he’d received that day.
“Come on,” Julie said. “I don’t think you’ve been eating. I see you at work. You’ve lost all kinds of weight and you look pale.”
“I’ve just been really busy,” Leonard said.
“I bet you haven’t eaten today,” she countered.
That was true. He hadn’t had so much as a cup of coffee when he woke up this morning. In fact, now that he thought about it, Goddammit, he was famished. And he’d been too busy the past couple of weeks to do any grocery shopping, so there wasn’t anything in his cupboards or fridge. Now that he thought of it, other than obligatory exchanges at work and necessary phone calls with Heather, Leonard hadn’t really spoken with another human being in, what, nearly three weeks?
“All right,” he said. “Do you know where I live?”
Julie said she did and that she would be over soon.
While he waited for her, Leonard spent the next twenty minutes examining the mailbox. He found nothing unusual.
Julie came into his house without knocking, carrying two foil-covered oven trays in her hands and a bottle of red wine under her arm. Leonard followed her into the kitchen, where she set the trays down on the kitchen table and uncovered them. Looking around, Julie smiled, and with a quiet giggle she gestured to the counter next to the microwave. “Interesting place to keep your mailbox,” she said.
“It fell off,” he said. “Gonna put it back on in the morning.”
The mail was in a paper bag in his pantry.
As she prepared the food, Leonard opened the wine and poured two glasses. He handed her one, they clinked, and Leonard drained his without removing his lips.
“Whoa, slow down, boy.”
“Sorry,” Leonard said. “You just have no idea how badly I needed that.”
He poured himself another.
It wasn’t long before they were sitting at the table, eating. Leonard tried to pace himself but found it difficult. He kept shoveling more food into his mouth than he could chew.
“I knew you were hungry,” Julie told him.
“Thank you,” Leonard said, then indicated the food, “for this.”
“You’re welcome.”
When they were through eating, they finished off the bottle of wine and talked about work, about family, about life. As the night progressed, Leonard began feeling more and more like his old self. And with the mailbox removed—he wasn’t sure, of course; possibly it was the wine going to his head—maybe he had solved his problem. Time would tell, however, but he felt confident that things might be looking up.
He felt good, felt human again, felt more like the Leonard Perry he knew than he had in weeks. And when Julie took his hand, moved in, and kissed him, he let her. And after a while of this, he took her into his bedroom.
When he woke up the next morning Julie was still asleep beside him. He watched her for a while, feeling a terrible mixture of things. Heather was coming back in just a couple of days, and look at what he had just done. Still, he couldn’t deny that there had been something very nice about it. Maybe more than just a one-night stand, maybe not. Last night and even this morning, he saw something in her he hadn’t seen before, a whole new side of Julie. One he liked a lot more than he ever thought he would.
It was late, even for a Saturday. Closing in on noon.
He kissed her forehead gently, and when he did, she stirred and opened her eyes. “Morning,” she said, her voice groggy with sleep and the previous night’s wine and activities.
Leonard got out of bed, nervous and worried. He stretched for a moment, then turned to her. “Coffee?”
She smiled. “Sounds good.”
Wearing only his boxers, he walked to the kitchen, then stopped dead in his tracks. His blood ran cold. Next to the microwave the mailbox was packed to the breaking point. Letters were crammed in and poked out the sides of the door, which was held shut by a rubber band. The hairs on his back and neck stood up, and a mixture of fear and rage swirled. He reached out and removed the rubber band. The door shot open and letters spat out and spread onto the floor, a postcard landing on his foot. It was the postcard he’d sent to himself. On it was his own handwriting, but it was not the message he’d written, which had been a smiley face and his initials. It now read:
Leonard,
Seems kind of like hell, huh?
Well, there you are.
Or you are there.
“Leonard?” Julie entered, rubbing her eyes, wearing nothing but one of his T-shirts.
Leonard spun on her. “What the hell are you doing to me?”
Taken aback, Julie furrowed her brow. “What do you mean?”
“You think it’s funny, is that it? How are you doing this?” He advanced on her, backing her into the living room.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I just brought it in last night. And then you happen to call, you happen to come over, and then . . . then . . . ”
“Leonard, you’re scaring me. What are you talking about?”
“You nasty bitch. I’m only gonna tell you this once. Cut it out. Just cut it the fuck out.”
Julie stood there a moment, staring at him with disbelief. Leonard could see in her eyes a genuine fear, a genuine confusion. But all the pieces fit. He didn’t entirely know how it had worked, but it did make a strange sort of sense.
“Get your ass out of here,” he told her. When she kept standing there in amazement, he screamed and raised his hand.
Julie raced back into the bedroom and slammed the door.
Leonard went back to the kitchen and picked up the mail. He put it on the table and drew a deep breath. A minute later Julie came out dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing last night, tears raining down her cheeks. She grabbed her oven trays and made for the door. “If this is how you feel, if you think you were cute last night, just wait until Heather gets back.”
He heard the front door slam. He picked up the still-full mailbox and slammed it against the floor, then took one of his kitchen chairs and beat the thing, crushed it, and kept hitting it, pulling at it with his hands, throwing it, smashing it, until it was four separate sheets of thin, crumpled metal. He put one piece in the kitchen garbage can, another in the bathroom wastebasket, tossed one into his backyard, and put the other in his car, where he later threw it into a trash can at a gas station.
He piled the mail onto his kitchen table and ripped up the postcard. Then he went out to various bars and spent the day getting drunk. No matter how much alcohol he had, every time he closed his eyes he was repackaging someone else’s mail.
That night Heather called. She was concerned about the way he sounded.
“Just went drinking with some of the guys,” he told her. “I’m a little tipsy, and I’ve been kind of down not having you here.”
“I can’t wait to see you,” she said.
His guilt of being with Julie tied a knot the size of Kentucky in his stomach and tensed his shoulders like so much sculpture chiseled from stone. “I can’t wait to see you either,” he said. “You’ll be here Monday?”
“My flight gets in around ten. I should be back around eleven, barring unforeseen delays.” She gave him her flight itinerary.
“I’ll take an early lunch,” he said. “We’ll go somewhere special.”
“I would love that,” Heather said. “How about I’ll meet you at your house; in case I’m running a bit late, you don’t have to be stuck somewhere waiting for me.”
“Sounds good,” he said, hearing Julie’s voice when she’d said those same two words this morning.
It wasn’t long after speaking with Heather that he passed out.
He dreamed about Julie.
Sunday he didn’t do much of anything. There was no mail that day, yet there was still the enormous stack on his kitchen table, not to mention the bag stuffed in the back of his pantry. For a long time he thought about it. He had removed the mailbox and brought it into the kitchen, and still there had been mail in it the next day. But now the mailbox was destroyed, torn into pieces. There was no longer a place for him to receive his mail. And since he was receiving so much of it, no postal worker was going to leave a stack of twenty, thirty, or forty letters just sitting on his doorstep, were they? Didn’t seem likely. Of course, nothing that had been going on seemed likely. Still, given what had happened, he concluded that it had to be the mailbox. Something about it had been causing all of this to happen. He felt terrible for how he’d acted towards Julie. On reflection, it didn’t make any damn sense that she would be doing it.
He went to the phone and called her. When he tried to apologize she called him a psychopath and said to leave her alone. When he tried to explain she wouldn’t hear it. She called him a crazy bastard and hung up.
Leonard almost called her back but didn’t. Instead he allowed his rage to take control. He picked up the letters from his kitchen table and began ripping them up, one by one, several at a time, whatever he got his hands on. Some he fed into his sink disposal and others he burned at the stove. He went to the back of his pantry, removed the bag, and did the same. He tore them, ripped them into shreds, then went at all the pieces with scissors.
In the end he had a garbage bag full of shredded paper and some ashes. He loaded it into the back of his car, drove it down to his office, and tossed it into the dumpster.
When he got home he called Julie again. This time he got her answering machine. He left an apologetic message and said he wanted to talk with her.
He spent the rest of the day drinking and calculating how much it would have cost him in envelopes and stamps to resend all the mail he’d just destroyed.
A deadline at work the next day, which was supposed to be a month away, had suddenly moved to the end of the week. The men’s room was out of order and Julie wouldn’t even look at him when they passed in the hall. But so far, anyway, no one else in the office seemed to know about what happened Friday night and Saturday morning. For the moment, she seemed to be keeping quiet, thank God.
It was right before he left for lunch that she came to him.
“I’m ready to talk,” she said.
“I would like to,” he said, “but I have to go right now. Can we talk when I get back from lunch?”
“We can’t have lunch?”
“I have to meet somebody.”
“Heather?” Her tone was menacing when she said the name.
He looked away and nodded.
“You going out to eat?”
“I’m meeting her at my house; then we’re going somewhere.”
Julie leveled an icy gaze on him. “We’ll talk when you get back from lunch.”
Leonard drove home, stopping by a floral shop on his way to pick up a dozen roses. He almost bought a card but had second thoughts. At home he cut the stems and put the flowers into a vase, then turned on the television and waited.
After watching an entire soap opera he realized he’d been home over half an hour. He got up from the couch and called her cell phone. He had to leave a message. He then looked at the flight itinerary, called the airline, and asked if the flight had come in on time. It had. He tried her cell phone again, and again had to leave a message. He’d give her a few more minutes. He could take a long lunch—it was important that he take a long lunch—even if he knew he’d catch shit for it later at work, for a couple of different reasons.
Another fifteen minutes passed. He was just about to call her cell again when the doorbell rang, followed by several sharp knocks. He took the flowers from the kitchen table, brought them into the living room, and set them on the coffee table. He straightened his hair, straightened his shirt, and opened the door.
On the doorstep was an enormous sack of mail, a dirty white canvas sack with the words “DEAD LETTER OFFICE—ALTERNATE ROUTING REQUIRED” stenciled over it in faded black letters.
Leonard slammed the door, locked it, then deadbolted it before returning to the kitchen for a stout drink.
He’d taken three steps in that direction when his foot caught on something, and he went over with flailing arms and a scream of outraged shock. He landed on the white canvas sack, clearly stuffed with more dead letters, and something else that was large and almost round.
The sack cushioned his body, but his head struck the floor hard. His last conscious thought as he blacked out was How did it get in? I locked it outside!
Sometime later he came back to his senses. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, maybe minutes, maybe hours; all he knew is that it was still day. A hard, slanting shaft of sunlight struck the open mouth of the bag inches from his eyes, spotlighting the thing inside.
A dead letter that had obviously been meant for him, though it wasn’t addressed.
Julie had died screaming. He knew that because her mouth and eyes were still open wide. Her teeth were covered in blood, her tongue a slimy red slug plastered to her cheek, glued to it by dried blood. The head was sealed inside a clear plastic bag, partially filled with her blood, but not a drop stained the hundreds, maybe thousands of dead letters it rested in.
“She was making trouble for you, Leonard.”
Startled, Leonard began to push himself up to run, but a heavy-booted foot planted itself between his shoulder blades and pushed him back to the floor.
“You don’t want to do that, mate.” Brief laughter, then the voice continued, “Much better off never seeing my face, I think.”
“Who are you?” The foot had lifted from his back, but Leonard stayed where he was, face pressed against the floor, eyes closed so he wouldn’t have to look at Julie’s dead face in the mailbag. “What do you want?”
“Who I am isn’t all that important, Leonard. What I want is to not have to come back here again.” The dry humor had left the man’s voice. Now it was spiced with irritation. “It’s a pain in the ass, to be perfectly frank. I have enough shit to do without babysitting dead letter officers.”
“What . . . ?”
“No questions,” the man said. “You have a job to do, and I think you’ll find the benefits more than adequate once you’ve completed your probationary period, but you don’t get to ask questions.”
There were several tense seconds of silence before the man spoke again, as if he was making sure his no-questions edict had gotten through.
“Good man,” he said at last. “You’re a quick learner. I knew that when you worked out the process as quickly as you did, but you’ve got a willful streak that is distressing. Since my gentle reminders weren’t enough to keep you in line, I’m here for our one and only face-to-face.”
Laughter again, a little less restrained than the last. “That is a figure of speech, of course. If you ever do see my face, it’ll be the last one you ever see.”
Frustration and fear overwhelmed him. Leonard began to weep.
“Oh for crying out loud, there’s no need for that. I’m not here to hurt you, just to straighten you out.”
With effort, Leonard silenced himself.
“Now open your eyes and look in the bag.”
Leonard groaned, but did as he was told.
Julie’s head was gone. In its place was a Polaroid.
It was a picture of Heather, stripped to her bra and panties, bound to a chair, gagged, horrified.
“The worlds grow, borders stretch, times change, but things stay together, and communication is the key. We can’t have a million and one dead letters clogging the system. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No,” Leonard said. “I don’t understand any of this.”
He closed his eyes against the tortured image of Heather, but it was burned into his brain. He’d never be able to unsee it.
“Ah, you don’t really need to, just as long as you do what you’re supposed to. Take care of your business and things will continue to move forward, but if you try anything . . . ” he paused for a second, as if in search of the right word, “ . . . ill-advised, I’ll have to send you another reminder.”
Leonard thought he understood the man’s meaning perfectly. He was sure the next head he received would belong to someone a lot more important to him.
The new silence held for a long time, but Leonard was afraid to open his eyes, to move from his place on the floor, and after a while, something that may have been sleep stole him away.
He awoke in the dark, and after a few moments of confusion he remembered where he was and what happened. He pushed himself up slowly, and when no one protested or pushed him back to the floor, he stood.
It was night now, late night, pitch-dark outside.
He turned on his living room lights.
Julie’s head was gone. The picture of Heather was gone. The mailbag, “DEAD LETTER OFFICE—ALTERNATE ROUTING REQUIRED”, was still there, open and spilling its contents onto his floor.
Leonard kicked the stray letters back into the open mouth of the bag and dragged it to his kitchen table.
He didn’t bother going to work the next morning. The phone rang several times but he didn’t answer. Instead he stayed in bed, stared at the ceiling, and thought about moving and where to move. Where could he go? Texas? California? France? Somehow, inside he knew that wherever he went it wouldn’t do him any good, though he knew he would have to try. He knew he wouldn’t be here long.
And if he did try to run, he knew he’d wake up some morning to find Heather’s head in a plastic bag.
He thought about all the messages on his machine from both yesterday and today from his work, wondering just where in the hell he was.
Fuck them. He was too busy.
He didn’t get out of bed until the early afternoon when the doorbell rang, and even then he almost didn’t bother. He knew what was there. It was always going to be there, coming in and coming in like an unfixable leak.
His meeting felt like a bad dream, but he knew it wasn’t.
Seems kind of like hell, he thought, and removed a box of envelopes and a roll of stamps from a kitchen drawer and set them on the table. Kind of like hell, yeah, but there you are.
Or you are there.