The Crumbled Hut

Grayson lived in a small stone hut in the wood in spite of the warnings from the other villagers that strange things lived in those woods. Being full of the hubris of youth, he paid their cautionary words no mind and built his home with stones he found scattered about the forest. Unfortunately, Grayson had a terrible sense of direction, and what he thought were scattered stones were in fact carefully arranged to create a containment ward against something old, something terrifying and hungry. In collecting them for his home, he had broken the bindings and set the ancient evil free.

Returning home along his carefully marked trail, he felt confused to find nothing but gravel piled there in small heaps where walls should be. He thought perhaps something had taken his home rock by rock at first. And yet, there were no footprints coming or going, or at least nothing he could identify as footprints. The walls also couldn’t have been crushed to gravel or there would be some sign of what had done it, wouldn’t there? And yet he couldn’t be lost, for his trail had led him directly there.

That’s when he noticed the strange tunnel of withered undergrowth, he knew he had found the trail of the thing that had destroyed his home. Once more overcome by the self-assurance that can only lead to folly, Grayson crawled into the tunnel after it. As he moved, he found the dirt becoming grittier, sandier. The branches surrounding him became far more brittle. Something was leaching not only the life but the… togetherness? out of everything, crumbling all around him plants and rocks into dust.

The tunnel opened into a large ash-gray pit and there in the center sat a grotesque creature with putrid yellow leathery skin covered in knots and writhing tentacles, and where each landed, the matter around it became even more brittle, crumbling to near nothingness. The thing noticed him and sent its tendrils out to catch the interloper, and Grayson only barely managed to dodge in time to save his life. Taking a nearby branch, he swing wildly at the thing, only to have the stick crumble to dust in the wind upon striking its unholy hide.

He could not fight, he now knew. He could only run. Darting for the tunnel, he made the best escape he could. The thing managed to whip at his leg, withering it to a uselessness he would suffer from for the remainder of his days, but he survived and was able to make the long trek back to the village elders to warn them of what had been set loose.

The elders did as they had done long ago and replaced the binding stones, but they could not help but worry. People believed in magic and monsters less and less each year, and year after year, the elders’ words fell on increasingly deaf ears. What would happen when the day finally came that there was no one who believed enough to learn the binding magics? What would happen when the elders died and the young and foolish wandered into the forest again and disturbed the carefully placed binding stones? What would happen when the thing got out? Would anything ever sate its strange hunger for that which holds the universe together? Were we already doomed?

- Originally mailed to W.A. in Mississippi

A Place to Put Things

The problem with stuff, thought Clarice, was that there were never enough places to put it. She ran out of shelf space long ago along with wall space for more shelves. Soon she had to start putting things in things. She stored extra toilet paper in the box spring of her bed. She kept spare toothpaste in the hollow tubes of the hidden toilet paper rolls.

When she had kids, they soon picked up on her space-saving mania. They started small, discovering pockets at a young age and keeping what odds and ends they could find there, but soon their pockets were full. “Be creative,” she told them. “Look for empty spaces and fill them. There’s always more room somewhere.”

Not long after, she began finding blocks in diapers and marbles in noses. Her proudest moment, however, was the day she found her kids, not even eighteen months old, had filled her boots with their breakfast. After all, they weren’t eating the food, and she wasn’t wearing the boots. Two unused things now only taking the space of one. She couldn’t have been happier.

- Originally mailed to B.N. in Virginia

Cat Heaven

It is widely known that cats have nine lives, but what few people realize is that cats also have nine heavens, one to follow each death. In each of these heavens, the cat that was dwells in a self-contained eternity and its next life resumed by the cat that will be, virtually identical to the previous life save for the lessons it learned in the previous heaven.

Of these heavens little is known, as cats are one of the most aloof of all creatures, and are great keepers of secrets. Only a few of these heavens are known, namely Belly Rub Heaven, String Heaven, and Heaven Where the Red Dot Is Slow. Of those heavens, all that we have are the names and a good guess what it must be like there.

The only cat heaven for which survives a first-hand account is Box Heaven. Mister Friskywhiskers returned after his fourth life with tales of Box Heaven, a place with boxes of every size and shape imaginable. Box Heaven had boxes big enough for a lion and small enough for a Singapura. It had boxes that smelled of tuna, boxes that smelled of mice. There were boxes that smelled of catnip and boxes that smelled of fresh new boxes.

Boxes could be stacked so cats could sleep in boxes on boxes, boxes in boxes, and even boxes in boxes on boxes in boxes. And the best part, he said, every box came with its own human staring on in disheartened defeat wanting to use the box the cat had claimed for its own, but unable to take it.

- Originally mailed to A.P. in Louisiana

Fortune Cookies

After decades on the job, the head writer for the Happy Go Lucky Fortune Cookie Company had grown disillusioned with the job. He had already run through all the clever little phrases and pithy proverbs he could come up with. He had exhausted the Analects by Confusious, half the book of Proverbs, Poor Richard’s Almanac, pieces of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War, and though he was ashamed to admit it, the occasional summer blockbuster. He was now officially completely out of ideas.

“What am I going to do?” he asked himself, pounding his head against his unproductive desk and crushing a cookie in the process.

Today’s rain is tomorrow’s whiskey, its fortune said.

“Good point,” he replied. “I need a drink.”

Grabbing his oldest and dearest friend, he hit the local pub determined to drink until he found a solution or he lost the floor, whichever came first. Five whiskey sours in and he had already unloaded the whole of his problem to his ever patient, ever drunk friend.

“Work,” his friend muttered with a shake of his head.

Yeah, thought the writer. Work. That said it all.

And that was the solution. He didn’t need words of wisdom or wit to fill his fortunes. Advice was one of those things everyone gave freely, even when a person would much rather just have a little understanding, someone to say, “I know what you’re going through because I’ve been there too.”

He hailed a cab and raced back to the office, diving head first into what would become his most successful series of fortunes, each one only a single word to ensure it could be felt by the most number of people. One word typed with a sigh and a shake of the head to say, “Stranger, I don’t know you, but what you’re going through? We’ve all been there. You’re not alone.”

- Originally mailed to R.Y. in Pennsylvania

The Ghost of the Enterprise

If the body is only the temporary earthly vessel of the eternal soul, it stands to reason that ghosts are the souls, or at least the fragments of souls, left behind during the separation of soul and body. These immaterial fragments, then, presumably can infuse into the material objects around them, leading to haunted houses and possessed items. Physical objects imbued with spiritual resonance.

These were the thoughts that filled the captain’s mind as he stared up at the clouds drifting through the blue skies of Veridian III.

And if a dying soul could leave a piece of it behind, scraps of spirit to seep into the things surrounding it, a living soul must also be able to leave pieces of itself behind. Man had long said things like, “I left a piece of me behind when I left home” or “She took a piece of my heart with her” or “A piece of me died that day.” So why couldn’t the pieces of our aggregate joys and sorrows also become a part of the places we work and live and love and die? Why can’t our experiences also instill into our cherished possessions these pieces of ourselves we shed little by little every day?

A starship, then, must be full of fragments of spiritual essence, especially one as great as the Enterprise. So many lives born and lost in its halls, so many worlds discovered. It had been full of so much life, so many powerful transformative experiences, great and terrible, each leaving a sliver of spirit behind to permeate the walls and circuits of the faithful vessel. With so many fragments of the countless souls to walk its halls, it seemed inevitable that the pieces would, upon sufficient concentration, knit themselves together, giving the ship a patchwork soul of its own.

When she came hurtling through the atmosphere those years ago, crashing into the unforgiving ground, was she merely destroyed, or did she die? And if she did die, might she have left her own fragment of spiritual essence in her wake to infuse into the planet of Veridian III? Might she have a ghost?

“Where are you now?” the captain wondered as the clouds drifted by. “Do you sleep in the ground where you fell, or do you fly still among the starry skies?”


- Originally mailed to H.L. in Mississippi

The Children’s Forest

There once was a small boy in a remote village in Austria whose step-father was of the wicked sort. At the slightest provocation, or sometimes with no provocation at all, he would unleash such cruelties upon the boy as would make all the world take pity upon him. His mother taken from him long ago by disease, he had no one to speak to, so he would go into the woods and tell his sorrows to the trees.

The trees heard his cries and vowed to protect him, to lead him to safety in his time need and to lead astray any who would do him harm. As the years passed, the boy came to care for the forest more than anything else. It nurtured him, cared for him. Led him to shelter and food. In all things it looked after him in a way a parent should, and as he grew, he took care of the forest in turn, chasing off poachers and ax men and cruel people who would use the seclusion to do foul deeds.

A man can only live so long, and in time the boy who had grown into a woodsman grew into an old hermit, and then grew to dust. The forest took his body into the earth, and pledged to look after all children in his honor. Children would come to the woods to play and the forest would lead them to safe places and away from dangers. When the children were lost, they would lead them home. The woods would open a path for kind parents to find their little ones, and twist the ways away through thorny brambles when those with evil intent in their hearts came into the woods in search of easy prey.

They vowed for as long as they lived to be a refuge for the innocent and pure and a bane to the wicked, the merciless, and the cruel. It is a vow the forest keeps to this day.

- Originally mailed to Gg in Texas

Miscommunication

So many problems in the world come from a failure to communicate. Bitter rivalries between neighbors, the quarrels of young lovers. The inability to communicate, or worse, the refusal to communicate has led to the downfall of many a relationship, romantic, professional, international. Such was the case with the two nations of the Grassi and Riktu.

The Grassi believe firmly in eating every bite offered, to show one loves the cook’s food so much that one would dare not let any go to waste. The Riktu, on the other hand, believe one should only ever eat half a dish, to show that the host was more than generous by offering far more than one could comfortably eat.

Diplomats met and were insulted by the other’s table manners, the Riktu thinking the Grassi greedy and the Grassi feeling the Riktu snubbed their cuisine, a national treasure. Naturally, neither side bothered to communicate their resentments. They just spread word about how awful the neighbors were among their own people. From there, all diplomatic meetings started on the wrong foot, the biases having long since turned to prejudices, and things only rapidly devolved from there.

The Riktu crossed borders first, so technically they were the invading aggressors in the war that followed, but saying so gives the false impression that both sides weren’t equally at fault for the violence to come. Ultimately, the Grassi won the war, virtually wiping out any semblance of Riktu sovereignty and enslaving the once proud citizenry.

Not that it mattered. The Grasso masters were soon dead, poisoned by a tainted wellspring. All of this, the poisons, the war, the anger and hostility, could have been avoided had they only communicated with one another. But of course, if they couldn’t be bothered to ask about a meal, they certainly couldn’t be bothered to ask about the wellspring. Where the Riktu saw a poisoned stream and thought, “We should build a statue of a man vomiting so people will know not to drink from this,” the Grasso saw the sculpted face, so regal and majestic, and thought, “This must be the water of the gods. Let us drink our fill.”

- Originally mailed to C.F. in Florida

Warning Signs

Doktor Monstrous, PhDemon, nearly conquered the world with her army of giant robots equipped with night vision and laser eyes and tentacle arms with clawed hands on the ends. Europe fell quickly and her mechanical armies marched across Eastern Europe into Asia, crushing all resistance in their path like Genghis Khan but in the opposite direction. Japan only barely expelled the invaders thanks to giant robots and oversized monsters having long since ingrained itself into the culture’s psyche.

From there, her metallic minions spread south, capturing the islands of the Pacific before claiming the California coast for her own. At night, all across the globe, people would lock themselves in their homes and huddle in closets as the horrific groan of vast metal legs thundered against the ground, making the earth shake with every heaving step. There they would sit and pray that whatever came next, morning or death, would come quickly.

The world watched in shock as nation after nation fell to her armies, but only to be saved by a massive EMP that knocked out all power in the world, stopping the robots but knocking humanity back a hundred and fifty years in the process.

Historians would, in years to come, wonder how it had come to that point without someone stepping in earlier to stop the villain. What was the first sign? When she started stockpiling enriched plutonium? Her blog, entitled, “The World and How to Rule It,” which outlined step-by-step her robot takeover plan? Perhaps the first warning sign was when she legally changed her name to Doktor Monstrous, PhDemon. Or should they have suspected her evil nature from the very start, when she would build robot armies out of blocks and command them to “destwoy!”

- Originally mailed to B.P. in Mississippi

Fairy Realty

The house was too low to the ground for flying fairies to be comfortable, especially given their fears of terrestrial predators. And yet, it was definitely far too high off the ground for wingless fairies. How was she ever going to sell it? Yet sell it she would. She had to. She needed the commission.

“You can do this, Daffodil Twinkleleaf,” she said as she stared herself down in the mirror. “You can do this because you are smart and talented and determined. You could sell a thesaurus to a Smurf. You are going to make this sale and you are going to earn the Golden Wings and become a member of the Fairy Realtor Ring and move up to that great real estate office in the sky. The one that issues licenses to sell homes on clouds. Think of the commission on a home for giants. All that square footage! You can afford the house of your dreams, and you know how pricey land in dreams is! Everything you ever wanted can be yours, Daffodil! And the first step to all of that is to sell this house.”

The first step to selling an impossible house was to find an impossible buyer. Something that jumped, like a cricket or grasshopper? No, it would be too difficult to leap up and open the door without slamming into it or falling short. A tiny-bodied thing with long, spindly legs perhaps, like Daddy Long Legs? No. Too claustrophobic. They didn’t have much mass, but they loved to spread out. Climbing things? Not likely, since there was that big pocket beneath the door that would make climbing in difficult, and the door was clearly not meant to be entered from the other sides.

She needed help. Unless, she realized, she was the help someone else needed. Of course! She went out onto the FairyWeb and pulled up a listing of fairy support groups until she found just the right one. The Sky’s the Limit, a support group for acrophobic fairies. A whole group of people who would love a beautiful tree home they could fly into, just as long as the door’s not too high off the ground.

- Originally mailed to J.D. in Mississippi

The Has-Been Dinosaur

There was a time, back when mini-golf was in its heyday, when Marty the Minigolfosaurus was something of a celebrity. All the hottest courses wanted him. All the other mini-golf dinosaurs wanted to be him. All the best mini-golfers wanted to try their skill against him. Marty couldn’t step onto grass without someone asking him to roar and maybe smack a ball aside.

He was living the dream. Beautiful reptiles. Fast cars. Big paychecks. A dinosaur couldn’t ask for anything more. Yes, these truly were the halcyon days for Marty the Minigolfosaurus.

But nothing lasts forever. Bowling became the thing. Laser tag. Arcades came and went, along with the cars, the money, the fame. He could barely find work standing in cornfields swatting away mice.

When Happy Gilmore came out, he brushed off the dust and brushed up on his roar. Surely with a box office hit comedy starring a big name draw like Adam Sandler, mini-golf would catch on again in a big way and he’d be back in the high life again.

But the mini-golf craze didn’t catch on again. Adam Sandler followed up shortly thereafter in which he played another idiot savant athlete, only this time in an already popular sport, and away went his dreams of the great mini-golf revival.

These days, Marty the Minigolfosaurus mostly just hangs out in his overgrown front lawn, his arms too short to reach the mower, and his finances to tight to pay someone to trim it for him. All day, he bats at whatever kids or critters may wander by and yells at them with a loud “Get off my lawn.” Is he bitter? A little. Resentful? Perhaps. Longing for the good old days? Absolutely. But that’s not why he yells, why he chases kids away. In his mind, he’s practicing, always practicing. Practicing his roar. Practicing at knocking away small things that get too close. Practicing for the day he knows deep in his heart of hearts will one day come. The day when people chant “Marty! Marty!” over obstacle-filled putting greens. The day mini-golf returns.

- Originally mailed to A.C. in Mississippi

His Greatest Battle

When he said his true arch nemesis was the Invisible Killer, people thought it was some light-bending supervillain, never seen because due to the cunning use of his powers. For years, the hero would talk about his battles with the Invisible Killer, the way his nemesis would strike when he felt he was on top of the world, would cripple him without the hero ever sensing the attack was coming. The hero would talk about how the Invisible Killer could find him any time, any place. The Invisible Killer knew all his weaknesses, all his flaws. The Invisible Killer existed only to break him. The Invisible Killer existed to utterly destroy him in mind, body, and spirit. Every day, he said, he woke wondering if that would be the day the Invisible Killer finally caught him wholly unprepared and brought him low for the last time.

“What can we do to help?” the people of the city asked.

“When you see me,” he said, “tell me that I’m needed, that I’m doing good, that the world is better with me in it. Remind me that the Invisible Killer is a deceiver who lies with half-truths, turning unfortunate accidents into complete catastrophes, framing me for every crime he can.”

The people of the city were fearful. If so great a villain existed out there, one so terrible that the greatest hero they had ever known feared him every moment of every day, what hope did they have? He tried to reassure them that they were safe. That it wanted him and him alone. Some were placated. Others were not the least bit relieved. A villain so devious surely wouldn’t stop after overcoming his only obstacle. No doubt his reign of terror would only spread should the hero lose, not vanish. A jaded, cynical few thought that there was no Invisible Killer. There were no reports of their battles, and from the way the hero described them, they were epic knock-down-drag-out fights until the hero couldn’t move at all. It’s just an act for attention, the cynics and naysayers would remark glibly on internet forums. And what was up with that request for help? What a glory hound!

For years, the hero battled the Invisible Killer until one day, he lost. He was found hanging by the neck in a room locked from the inside, a note tucked inside his spandex mask.

“I am too weak,” the note said. “He saw beneath my mask and knew all along. I am too weak and powerless and slow to save anyone. I am too weak to even save myself. The Invisible Killer has defeated me at last.”

Police put out a manhunt for the Invisible Killer but he was never found. The cynics called it a stunt, a suicide to make the hero out to be a martyr. After all, what villain would give his nemesis the time to write a note before killing him? Plus, there were no signs of struggle. Just another ploy in the hero’s lifelong need for attention. Only a few recognized the Invisible Killer for what he was. They told the world in blogs and murals, but no one believed them. After all, he was the hero, beloved by millions, the savior of countless lives, he who had the sort of power everyone longed for. He was the envy of people everywhere. What did he possibly have to be depressed about?

- Originally mailed to J.S. in Washington

Dinosaur Fences

There were no emergency plans for a wild triceratops on the rampage because the zoo had no triceratops exhibit, to say nothing of the fact that everyone believed them extinct. As such, the zoo was forced to improvise on how to handle the furious beast. Sure, the first steps were easy. Get people out of harm’s way. Keep people from coming back in. Straight forward stuff. But then what?

The zoo called all the dinosaur experts they could find, but their knowledge was all theoretical. Some proved useful, some not so much. Facts regarding speed and strength were relatively accurate, which helped zoo workers remain safe as they controlled the situation. Dietary information was useful in very general terms. They knew the beasts liked to eat plants and trees, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were fond of the particular plants and trees native to the area. This greatly diminished the zoo keepers’ ability lure the wild thing to a secure location. And temperament? Who knew if the thing’s current rage was a fleeting thing, brought about by finding itself in a strange new place and time, or was this its nature?

All the zoo keepers could do was get to a safe distance and observe, like proper scientists and researchers. That’s when they noticed three facts that would be crucial to containing the errant dinosaur. First, the thing was tiring itself out. They would be able to act soon, but what to do? They only had a limited time to act, not enough time to build a full on cage. Besides, who knew where it would finally fall asleep or if they would be able to move it when it did? Second, they noticed that though the dinosaur could charge and rampage with the best of them, it couldn’t jump. Third, and most crucially, it was very vain about its bony nose, doing its level best not to scuff up the polished shine it had. It didn’t seem like much, but it was enough. They had a plan.

When the dinosaur finally fell asleep, they rushed in and surrounded the beast with a small metal fence. It installed quickly, didn’t take a lot of resources to pull together in an emergency, and best of all, it contained the dinosaur. After all, its stubby little legs couldn’t jump over the low fence and it didn’t dare risk scuffing its nose bone breaking through.

- Originally mailed to M.B. in Texas

The Blight

If you would have asked a person twenty years ago if a non-living thing could get sick, they would have laughed at you or made some crack about computer viruses. But that was before we knew better, before the Blight.

It began small, infecting things like wooden chairs, causing them to weaken and break. People chalked it up to age or rot or termites at first. Then clothes began to tear and develop small holes, but as much of the textile industry had been outsourced and shipped off to the lowest bidder, people simply begrudged low production standards and bought replacements. Then it spread to plastics, which could become brittle with age and poor treatment, but even so, it happened so quickly to so many items, even brand new things still on store shelves. Soon glass, concrete structures, metal objects, all began to weaken and crumble.

Try though they might, researchers couldn’t identify the cause, only trace its path as it extended its reach across the continent, growing stronger and more powerful, crumbling entire buildings in a matter of hours. It spread like a virus, which put to mind the idea of identifying the Blight’s patient zero. Carefully tracking what records remained, communication lines having disintegrated and paper not having fared any better, researchers were able to trace it back to a pile of rubble that had once been research lab in Kansas City.

Over decades tracking down surviving researchers and piecing together what fragile remaining bits of records could be found, the team sent to discover the cause of the Blight found that in an effort to “vaccinate” objects against entropy and create more durable goods, scientists had to create a means to accelerate entropy to check the strength of the vaccine. The Blight, a wasting disease for unloving things.

Not that this did anyone any good. The Blight devoured most anything man-made in days if not sooner, and any attempts to recreate the technology in hopes of reversing the Blight were destroyed before completion, literally undone by its own success.

- Originally mailed to Z.B. in New Mexico

The Practical Necromancer

People have in their minds these very biased ideas about ghosts, always longing for revenge, to see their loved ones one last time. After fifteen years in the psychic business, professional medium Indira Patel harbored no such delusions. Sure some ghosts have these overwhelming maddening passions, but most don’t. Most are about as full of drive and vigor in death as they are in life, which is to say, not much. They are, after all, the same people they were before they died, only without the maddening drives of the limbic system. Even the passionate ones settled down eventually once their true loves died, reuniting the star-crossed lovers, or those they hated got some form of comeuppance.

No, Indira learned that after decades long dead, what people missed the most were mundane things. The small trivial pleasures that get taken for granted so often in life. The smell of a pipe. The feeling of a good comfy couch. With humanity being so vast and diverse a species, one could, with enough time, find someone who missed just about anything. That realization prompted Indira to make the switch from séances to full necromancy.

As far as she was concerned, it was a win-win. Here were the deceased, longing to do things like wash dishes, take out the trash, mow the lawn, and she got free housekeeping. Sure the neighbors complained when the ghost fires rose from her lawn along with the souls of the chore-loving dead, but they were just jealous. They didn’t have ghosts to fetch their morning paper.

- Originally mailed to J.W. in Mississippi

Fragile Energy Club

Ashton Clark had no idea where the box came from or who had sent it. All he knew was that when he returned from work that fateful Friday there was a large package with no return address. No invoice. Only the label “fragile Energy Club.”

What could it be, he wondered? What was a fragile energy club? Was it an energy club like out of some sci-fi movie, a baton crackling with electric arcs? Surely high tech like that must be breakable. Fragile might be a warning to the shippers. But that didn’t make sense. Clubs were made to be pounded against things, and hard too! So fragile must be a descriptor. Whoever it was presumably made sturdy energy clubs, and he just happened to receive their low budget fragile model. Of course, that didn’t make much sense either. Why make a fragile club at all?

For weeks he agonized over the meaning while waiting for someone to claim this mysterious package, or perhaps explain it to him, for he was too afraid to open this box and possibly be blasted by any fragile energy that may have been broken in transit.

Finally, his curiosity grew too much to bear and he opened the box. Inside, he found Al Gore and Elon Musk sitting comfortably, discussing the fragile nature of a system built on non-renewable energy resources and the need for the people of Earth to unite and develop alternative sustainable, renewable sources of energy.

Ashton was astounded, not only that this small club of renewable energy advocates could have been inside the box, but they had been in there for over a month without any sign of food. That’s when he noticed the human skeleton. Seeing the look of horror on his face, Al Gore spoke. “I know what this looks like, but you can relax,” he said. “We cooked him on a solar stove.”

- Originally mailed to E.S. in Mississippi

Labels

Looking back, it’s hard to read those forum posts and web comments from the late 1990’s to early 2000’s, and understand what life must have been like. “Don’t label me,” people would say. “Labels hurt.”

“We label products to let people know about them,” a senator would say not many years later. “Nutrition labels. Warning labels. Explicit Content labels. Labels help us know if something is good for us, if something is right for us. Why then, shouldn’t we label one another?”

He then, unironically, launched into a history of labels on people. The mark of Cain. Branded and tattooed criminals. The scarlet letter. Meghan’s Law. Titles, he said, were just labels we agreed as a society to have. Officer. Judge. Doctor. Reverend. Mr. Mrs. Ms. What was so bad about labels?

And so after much debate, the Human Universal Label’s Act passed, requiring that at least once per year, everyone undergo an aptitude/attitude battery to determine which label(s) they should be required to wear. A person could take it more often if they chose, but then they risked being labeled “over-eager” or “obsessed.”

There was resistance, sure, but it didn’t take long for people to come around to the idea. All it took was to show up to a blind date or a party or office team building exercise and immediately spot the douchebag to truly see the system, imperfect though it was, had its merits.

- Originally mailed to D.H. in Mississippi

Drinks on Me

For as long as any bird could remember, mankind had provided birds with lovely baths in which to clean themselves and quench their thirst after long days of singing.  This service was provided to the birds as far as they could tell with no expectation of future repayment. No terms or conditions. Just free water, even in times of drought.

“Why do you think they do it?” asked a young sparrow named Willsley.

“Who knows?” said her mother. “Why does the sun shine? Why do cats chase us? It is simply their nature.”

Willsley thought that so great and selfless a service as humanity had provided to them since time immemorial ought to be rewarded. But how? What token of gratitude could one bird offer? And with no hands besides? That is when Willsely Sparrow had her great idea. She first campaigned locally, building a reputation as a fair minded city alderman, then using that position to leverage a city councilwoman nomination, then mayor, governor, U.S. senator, and finally President of the United States. Her legacy of social programs and fiscal responsibility was well received on both sides, but to her mind, her greatest achievement was her system of national public water fountains and bathrooms, repaying the debt she felt her people long owed humanity.

- Originally mailed to P.M. in Mississippi

Bedtime Stories

As a young man, Christopher had a habit of infusing his possessions with personalities and feelings. He wore shirts he didn’t care for because he didn’t want them getting picked on by other shirts in his drawer because they never got worn. The epic battles between his action figures never ended because no one was ever defeated. Christopher being unwilling to let any of his toys end the day feeling like losers.

As he grew up, this empathy for inanimate objects didn’t wane, but he did become more aware how odd others might think him if they knew. Small wonder then that he ended up running a flea market when he grew up. Though he long since learned to keep his quirky relationships with objects secret, he never abandoned it.

At night at the end of market days, people would think of him gracious and kind when he would volunteer to tarp up their merchandise for vendors, especially those who had had a bad day and hadn’t sold much. And he was kind, but in his mind his kindness was not for the vendors, but the poor goods who went another week feeling unsold and unwanted. He would drape the tarps over the remaining merchandise like a blanket, tucking the used goods in at night, and telling them all bedtime stories about the big wide world full of people just looking to buy someone just like them and all the grand adventures they would go on with their new appreciative owners. In his mind, he didn’t run a flea market. He ran an orphanage for lost treasures.

- Originally sent to A.C. in Illinois

The Grim Flea Market Vendor

After a thousand years doing the whole scythe thing, Death decided he had grown bored of the whole Grim Reaper image, and so he sought the services of an undisclosed but reputable ad agency/PR firm in New York.

“Yeah, the Reaper thing has to go” said the PR man. “It’s unrelatable. Not many farmers left in the world, and most of ‘em don’t even do their own reaping. They use machines to do it.”

“So I should look more like a Terminator?” Death asked with a hopeful gleam in his eyes.

“Nah,” said the man. “First, the terminator loses too often. Bad for your image. Second, people love their technology. That’s all about what’s new. What’s coming in, not what’s on its way out.”

“So your idea is…?”

“The Grim Flea Marketer,” he said. “He sweeps through homes taking objects that were once beloved but have outlived their use. He takes those old and broken things to a place many talk about, some positively, some poorly, a place people talk about going to someday but always put off. He takes them to a place where all your old stuff--that old couch you found in college, your scratched boyband cd, the blender with only one working speed--a place where all the ghosts of your former life go, never to return.”

Death thought the idea silly, but what did he know? He was in the business of taking souls, not image management. And so, the Grim Flea Market Vendor he became.

- Originally sent to K.B. in Kentucky

Toast Academy

One does not simply wake in the morning and decide to be toast. No, one can have all the toasty desire in the world, but without the right experiences, one will still be only bread. No, one must go to Toast Academy if one wishes to become toast.

There are many Toaster Academies. Some only take two students at a time, others handle eight or more. Some are pop-in pop-out affairs, some require the student to get comfortable because they will be there a while. It’s important to go to a good academy, regardless of how many the facilities can handle. One doesn’t want to attend an academy that doesn’t provide a well-rounded experience. Those poor types focus too much to the point of being virtually unusable.

Of course getting into a good Toast Academy is only the first step. One must find balance in their studies. The slackers in the back of the class, by the end of their time at Toast Academy we toast in name only, while the over-achievers trying to sit as close to the instructor as possible often burn out, which is more unfortunate. The slacker can always give it another go later. Toast Academy, much like life, is all about balance.

It takes hard work, planning, and patience to go from bread to toast. It isn’t easy, but it is an important, transformative experience that leaves its students changed for the better ready for the world to chew it up for breakfast.

- Sent to H.C. of Alabama