Split House

Everyone called Elloise mad when she insisted on taking half of everything during her divorce from her husband Earl. Half of everything isn't uncommon, half the money, half the possessions, and in these respects, she was reasonable. She took half the books, half the dishes. She took one of their two dogs. With singular items, however, her madness showed. They had only one house, and she wanted half of it. Earl proposed they sell the house and split the proceeds, but Elloise was not satisfied. She wanted half the house. He protested, but she ignored him and took a chainsaw to the walls. In the end, she had half a house. She was crazy, they would say, certifiably nuts. Then one day, she met a divorced man named Ray who also owned half a house. They talked, they fell madly in love, and with a little carpentry, they were able to make a new house out of their two literal broken homes. The neighbors agreed, theirs was a relationship of pure insanity, but all relationships and all people have their insanity, and as Elloise and Ray would say, love is finding the crazy that matches your own. 

Originally mailed to J. Dunn from d'Iberville, Mississippi

Planning Purgatory

The Industrial Revolution played havoc on God's civil engineers. Oh sure, Heaven and Hell were always pretty easy to organize. The people in Heaven were always treated like kings only much much better, and Hell was set up to treat its residents like some combination of prisoners and peasants, only worse. That way everyone felt appropriately awarded or punished. Purgatory, post Industrial Revolution, however, was a nightmare. It used to just be luke warm gruel and a typical day in the fields for the poor and for the wealthy a calf that was kind of fatted followed by a jester who had a couple of good jokes, but were all pretty obvious. Differences between men and women, the quality of tavern food, and complaints about work. With the rise of the middle class, and then further, the striation of the upper, middle, and lower classes into their own self contained upper middle and lower classes and the number of purgatories that God's civil engineers had to coordinate became a hydra to slay, for each slice of the population had to have an afterlife carefully blanded to their own life experiences. A hundred tv channels was a perfectly fine purgatory for the lower-middle class, but was practically heaven to the upper-lower. Supermarket beef wellington and chicken cordon bleu for dinner each night was hell for the lower-upper class, heaven for the middle-middle, but perfectly so-so for the upper-middle. Purgatory's designers breathed a sigh of relieve that at least a long work day with stupid co-workers stayed consistent through each level. After carefully constructing the Nine Circles of Purgatory, funding for the afterlife skyrocketed. Too many special orders, too many administrators. “Maybe it would save us money,” the engineers said to God one day after a budget cutting meeting, “if we just re-widened the gap between the rich and everyone else like the good old days.”

- Originally mailed to M.J. Navoy in Picayune, Mississippi

C-Block Scout Troop

In prison, a group of C-Block lifers sat around one afternoon lamenting their life choices. I shouldn't have robbed that bank. I shouldn't have shot that guy. I shouldn't have tried to sell five kilos of coke to that cop. Then they began to reflect farther back, to look at the decisions that led them to their various lives of crime. After tracing their way through their past, through their criminal twenties and delinquent teens, they finally reached childhood, and somewhere between talks of failed parents and bad schools, they all realized another thing they had missed out on. All of them had either been pulled from Scouts programs early or never been a Scout at all. It was a shot at redemption, they decided, but how could they do it? There weren't exactly woods in the prison yard to go camping in. That's when Inmate #54363-A, who founded a tech company and then embezzled away everything, came across the idea of telecamping. Using a CraigsList ad for a Scout Master, the band of criminals met Roger Acorn, who always wanted to be a Scout Master but had also missed his boat many years ago. Through the wonders of modern telecommunications and prison ingenuity, he taught them everything a scout should know. Navigating by the stars. Making knots with rope (made from sheets). Knife (or in this case, shiv) safety. How to build a proper tent (more sheets). They could build a fire in theory. They knew which berries to eat and how to catch a fish if they ever made their way into the world again. After earning their eagle badges, they realized they had all the tools they needed to escape prison and live as free men in the wilderness. They realized this, but they didn't do it, for they had also learned a thing or two about integrity and responsibility, and spent the rest of their lives in prison not because they had to, but because they knew they should.

- Originally mailed to D. Nichols of Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Lost Jetpack

The Hyperion Hotel had a strict lost and found policy. A guest who left any items behind had thirty days from check-out to claim any forgotten items before they were turned over to the house keeping attendant who found it. Naturally, when Helga Oglethorpe went to clean room 208, she did her best not to get her hopes up. There in the closet was a jetpack, and not just any jetpack. This one belonged to Air Commander, Centerville's own superhero. Ever since she was a little girl, she wanted to fly, and here in her hands she had everything she needed to do so. But how could she keep it? Air Commander was her hero, the hero of millions, in fact. Without the jetpack, who was he? She placed the jetpack in a box and sealed it before turning it in to keep its contents a secret. She mulled it over as she waited the required thirty days, and when no one claimed it she took it home.

She wanted to fly it so desperately, but Air Commander needed it back. He hadn't been seen in a month. She knew his secret identity, he had checked into the hotel under the name of ace reporter Tom Hawkins. Maybe she could fly it, just once, to his house to drop it off, but no. That would reveal his secret identity if anyone saw her, and who wouldn't notice a cleaning lady flying through the air on a borrowed jetpack and landing in the lawn of a local celebrity? She thought about bringing it over in the box or calling him on the phone to let him know she had it, who knows how he would respond to discovering she knew his secret. She could mail it in an unmarked box, but he would no doubt suspect it was booby trapped and never use it anyway. She couldn't think of how to return in safely. No, she decided. The only way to get the jetpack back to him on his terms was to fly around town, using it as much as possible and wait for Air Commander to come to her.

- Originally mailed to M. Blackwood in Los Angeles, California

Plans for Doomsday

Another world war was inevitable, and it going nuclear only slightly less so. Experts across the globe forecast virtually identical doomsday scenarios. What would set off the war and when. Who would go nuclear first. Who would retaliate and where. When it would finally end. Fallout levels and how long the resulting nuclear winter would last. So precise were these myriad independent predictions that many, including the generals themselves, admitted defeat before even starting, and proceeded with the war anyway for they felt they no longer had a choice in the matter. People were so caught up in the “this is what will happen” part of the message that they completely overlooked the “unless we do something about it” bit at the end. Nations readied themselves for war just as predicted, even though they knew they would lose. Everyone, philosophers and laymen alike, bemoaned the death of free will if indeed it had ever existed at all. It had a strange effect on the psyche of the world, for though everyone knew the end was nigh, nowhere in the predictions-turned-prophecies was there mention of panic or rioting. No mention was given to the civilian masses at all except in terms of casualties and collateral damage. People assumed this meant that they would carry on life as normal until the end, and so they did. Only a few people deviated from their day-to-day existences, and even then only in small ways. Women didn't wait for men to propose as often, for instance, and some restaurants in the rural areas outside of major cities began to include in their advertising that their patios would have the best views for the end of the world.

- Originally mailed to J. and L. Stillman of New York City, New York

Alzheimer's Trucker

 

Wendy Phillips had been with United Shipping for thirty seven years by the time she developed Alzheimer's disease. The diagnosis devastated the small company. They couldn't let her go. She was one of the first five employees. She had an amazing driving record. She'd run the same route for fifteen years. Her customers knew her, loved her, trusted her. She was practically family. Even so, these days she would often forget where she was going and all the perishable goods in the trailer ran a very real risk of spoiling. What could they do?

But where there is adversity coupled with people who love and support one another, there is hope. Her friends, co-workers, and clients set tracked her route down to her parking space. Then, over the course of a week, they vandalized road signs across the tri-state area. Words, phrases, sentences, all spray painted along her route so that should she have an episode, she could still make her way to where she needed to be.

“Exit here, Wendy.”

“This is the path we take.”

“Park here and honk four times.”

When she arrived at her stops, she didn't always know what was going on, but those around her did, and they always made sure she had warm food, good company, and a place to stay until she became lucid again.

- Originally mailed to C. Procenko from Toronto, Ontario in Canada.

Advertising Cthulhu

 

 

 

 

Cthulhu's followers were a secretive bunch, but it seemed the harder they tried to conceal their existence, the more problems they had with police, private detectives, academics, and pulp writers doing everything they can to delve into their mysteries and throw monkey wrenches into their schemes. Not that these daring individuals could help themselves. Man was by a nature a creature of immeasurable curiosity and insatiable discontent. He wants nothing more than to have what he has been told he cannot possess or to learn what he is not meant to know. For centuries the cultists presumed the answer was more secrecy. After all, if the rest of society knew nothing of the Old One's existence, how could they pry? But then jealous wives wondered where their husbands went when they claimed to be bowling and meddlesome police inquired into the disappearances around town.

In 1987, when the stars were almost right, they stumbled upon the answer. The old truth held that the more man was told he should not have something, the more he wanted it, but so too was its unspoken reciprocate. Man wanted nothing to do with anything required of him. The cult began to publicize their activities, to print books and games about their dark lord. They merchandised action figures and vests and Franklin Mint commemorative plates. They preached door-to-door. They made Cthulhu so ubiquitous that cultists could now freely do as they pleased, for the last thing anyone wanted was to learn a fellow was into the Great Old One and be forced to spend the rest of the night listening to him prattle on about how glorious it would be when Lord Cthulhu rose from his slumber and devoured the world.

“What are you doing?” police would ask cloaked men holding knives to a bound man's throat.

“Making a sacrifice to Cthulhu, who-”

“Enough!” the police would cry. “I don't need to know all that.”

And he would then fake an important call from dispatch to extricate himself from the ensuing lecture.

 

- Originally mailed to J. Tahon of De Haan, Belgium

 

Hay Racing

In the backwoods of Tennessee where wifi is unheard of, men will race anything to pass the time. Naturally they raced cars and horses, but one can't race horses every day and cars need gas. After a while, they began racing cows (ridden) and pigs (no jockey). Still, too much cow racing and the milk got weird and pigs required special pens to make them go in the direction they needed. Too much work. Chickens wandered about aimlessly and would escape the special pig tracks. Turtles and frogs were too indifferent. One day, Bartholomew Magee came up with the notion of racing hay. The bales were already round and would roll well, and besides, the crop needed to be gathered up anyway. Why not make the finish line the collection point? So they did. Though it took some thinking, they even overcame the only real obstacle. Convincing the hay to race. In the end, it was a simple matter. They motivated the hay the way most people are motivated. They told the hay it wasn't good enough for the far end of the field and let hay prove them wrong.  

- Originally mailed to A. Anderson of Portland, Oregon

Party Time Express

Charles Lambert, though much maligned at seven p.m., was the undisputed king of the after party. Early on, when he would show up at shindigs with the Party Time Express, everyone laughed and teased. “Where are the clowns?” they'd ask, or “When do we bob for apples, grandpa?” He got no respect until nine at the earliest.

But once the libations started flowing, once the party was good and hopping and everyone was sauced like pasta, they lined up beer in hand a whooping at the top of their lungs to ride his bright and colorful train. He'd drive them everywhere, around the yard, through the kitchen, or down to the corner store for a beer run. Once people loosened up and finally remembered they were there to forget they were adults for awhile, then the world was his oyster. His primary colored, drunk friend filled oyster.

- Originally mailed to A. Perkins of New Orleans, Louisiana

Plants vs Humans

Scientists often spoke about how long it would take the Earth to destroy everything man made if he were to sudden vanish. Most presumed this was simply a thought experiment. Quite the contrary, it was a warning. The Earth, they said, actively, consciously sought to destroy mankind. Vines, the conjectured, did not seek out cracks in walls because it was convenient. Instead, it deliberately sought cracks to further destroy walls and buildings. Root systems do not attempt to penetrate leaky pipes because they desire its water but because they know the pipes are ours.

Early man knew this. It is why he first domesticated plants, to show them who was boss. It is why he eats so many fruits and grains, to hurt plants' ability to reproduce. Our first campfires were not for warmth or cooking. They were warnings. “Forests,” they said, “we defy the trees you drop on us and your thorns that cut us. We hack them up and burn their bodies! We carve their corpses and make homes of their bones!”

The historical record is inconsistent as to who started this quiet war, but it will no doubt continue for as long as man and plant exist in the same space.

- Originally mailed to J. Hall of Jackson, Mississippi