Tin Men

Once a beloved but clumsy wood cutter, the Tin Man had become a monster since he took control of the forest in a bloody coup. People dreaded the coming of his “justice” which fell upon them as quickly as the blade of his axe. He was a heartless tyrant who cared nothing for his subjects. There were attempts to overthrow him, but most weapons the poor peasants could fashion deflected effortlessly off his metal body, and they learned soon enough that the few that could puncture his iron hyde did nothing, for the Tin Man was as hollow as he was heartless, a foul ghost trapped in an empty metal suit. So great a dissatisfaction cannot go unaddressed, however, and though they dared not speak their thoughts aloud for fear of his axe and they could no more assassinate him than change his mind, they resorted to an anonymous protest, crafting men of tin cans and leaving them hanging from the trees of the forest and the poles in town.

- Originally mailed to J. Cox of New Orleans, Louisiana

Hidden Style

You would never know it to look at the guy, but Hansel Feinstein was a sharp dressed man. He kept his trouser creases so sharp they could cut. He coordinated his various ensembles like a special forces surgical strike. He had no fewer than fifty sets of cufflinks for every occasion and he kept a man on retainer just to keep his closet of shoes, from loafers to wing tips and every other piece of footwear imaginable, polished and ready to go at a moment's notice. He had closet after walk in closet dedicated to shirts alone with every possible attractive combination of cut, cloth, and color. His suit guy was so talented, Italian tailors imported from him. Hansel was a clothing god.

But it never did any good. His silk double breasted charcoal pinstripe, a textile work of art, never swayed a single negotiation, though its very appearance could make the hardest CEO yield to anything. His two-tone zoot suit with the white gold and pearl buttons could make the most chaste women chase him, but they never had a chance to, for they never saw it. Hansel's drive for the perfect outfit was so acute that though he wore his exquisite clothes constantly, he could never reveal them for fear that a touch of dust here or the wrong lighting there might ruin the effect and present him in an unrivaled but still inferior light. And so the world's best dresser walked the earth in a protective plastic suit, no one ever the wiser at the immaculate clothing hidden beneath that sixteenth of an inch of yellow vinyl.

- Originally mailed to J. Womack in Brooklyn, New York

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

Bottle Party

The after party at the end of the water bottle convention was the stuff of legend. All of the bottles would gather together in the Magnolia Ballroom and dance the night away, letting loose all the frustrations of work, the pent up energy from sitting in dull meetings all week. They would rant about their bosses, rave about the good speakers, and mercilessly joke about the presenters who clearly had no idea what they were talking about. They schmoozed. They networked. On the whole, everyone had a pretty good time. But the after party at the end of the 2008 convention almost ended it for everyone.

It started typically enough, but when the usual DJ, an oldies and slow jams kind of fellow took ill, his replacement DJ Dubstep had to fill in at the last minute without warning. From the moment the bass dropped, every bottle present knew things were different. The booming beats vibrated them down to the very liquids of their souls. The bottles rippled and sloshed like never before, and the laser lights reflected through them, turning each into a glorious, gyrating kaleidoscope, a prismatic wonder unleashed.

In the morning, the hotel staff found the whole lot of them undressed and passed out, piled atop one another on the floor. There were awkward apologies. Nervous glances toward the ground. Excuses about intoxication. Everyone accepted the story, but no one believed it. After all, it was pretty clear that no one had gotten drunk the night before.

- Originally mailed to Karen Murphey of Chicago, Illinois

Integrity Day

Every first Monday in November, the people of Williamsburg, Louisiana would celebrate Integrity Day and the coming of the Thin Man. People would dress in costumes and carry large puppets to walk the streets admitting their mistakes and shortcomings in exchange for candies and cakes. It was a day when people could quit their jobs or break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend with no hard feelings, so long as they were honest about why, for that was the nature of Integrity Day. It was a chance to be honest with others, to come clean about being no good for someone, and to step away before causing any more problems. Originally, the holiday was celebrated in June, for the story goes that the Thin Man, a top hatted gentleman tall and twig skinny, would come out of the woods and whisk away anyone who thought to enter into a marriage or business arrangement with secrets or ill intentions. As most marriages happened in June and many business deals centered on the coming crops, the beginning of summer seemed the logical time to celebrate Integrity Day. However, as elections became more heated, the holiday gradually shifted to the day before elections in the hopes the Thin Man would come and take away any scheming politicians before they could be elected, or at least force the politicians to come clean before any ballots were cast. It did virtually nothing, as politicians would simply make some trivial token confession and then use their presence on Election Day as evidence that they were trustworthy and morally upright individuals.

- Originally mailed to M. Hendry of Davenport, Florida

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

 

The Judas Cow

“Tomorrow when they open the gates, do not follow me,” the cow they called Judas said to me.

“Why not?” I asked, for I was new to the pasture.

“They take you do your death!” he cried.

“That is absurd. Everyone knows they take you to Sunshine Valley where the grass is always tall and green. You don't get to go because you have no faith.”

“It is true! None who go ever return!”

“Here we have this field where there is hay and a roof over our heads and room to stretch and graze. I am milked daily so that my udders do not swell. If they wanted to kill us, why would they take such care of us?”

“They intend to eat you!” Judas said. “They carve the flesh from your bones and devour your body.”

“Nonesense. They have no claws, no sharp teeth. They lack the speed of wolves. Ha! As though these few creatures could overpower us or consume so many.”

“I know what I know,” said Judas and walked away.

The following day, we followed him up a ramp, but he was diverted at the last minute to another pen, his punishment for having no faith in Sunshine Valley. As I walked up the ramp, however, I couldn't shake what he had said. I decided, though too late for the decision to actually mean anything, that even if we were being led to the slaughter, the caretakers have been nothing but kind to me. I will not do them the unkindness of breaking our trust now.

- Originally mailed to J. Cox of New Oreleans, Louisiana

Dapper Plastic Aliens

People often look at the symbols older cultures created, or the works of art that can only be seen from the sky and they assume that long ago, extra-terrestrials came to earth to give us a scientific jump start. Of course, it is easy to look at symbols from another culture and make inferences about their meanings because we have no associations of our own to muddy up the process. This is why many of of the same people who point out the extra-terrestrial influences on the past completely overlook the signs that aliens still guide our scientific development. For instance, the Chinese are aware that without alien intervention, we never would have developed plastics. International relations being what they are, however, they cannot risk their position by making such a “ridiculous” claim. Instead, they create symbols much as the people of old did, imprinting upon containers from their takeout restaurants the following image. Most mistake it for a brand or something that simply means plastic. Only the few removed from their own personal experiences with Chinese takeout see it for what it truly is: a starman in a nice suit, surrounding himself with plastic. Theorists still debate, however, whether he is wearing a tie or has a fu manchu mustache.

- Originally mailed to B. Bowser of Brandon, MS

Thwarted Alien

It is a belief widely held by conspiracy theorists and ufologists that there exist just out of phase with our own world an infinite number of other realities neatly stacked atop our own. Those who scoff at tales of the long dead returning argue that ghosts are simply beings from these other worlds visible as through a window when conditions are just so and portions of the two parallel realities briefly graze each other. In the rare cases in which they overlap, we sometimes get reports of people vanishing without a trace or the appearance of people without a verifiable past.

On December 15, 1974, mankind quite unintentionally averted disaster when our world and another very different from our own intersected for seven and a half seconds. In that short time, a creature fueled by hatred and destruction crossed over into our own world. Thankfully, at that precise spot in space and time, we were building a parking garage and the beast found itself caught half phased within a concrete support pillar being poured. Because the parking garage was built by skeptics, they thought nothing of the haunting little round face in the middle of the completed pillar and dismissed it as a strange fluke in the cement.

- Originally mailed to J. Knight from Pascagoula, Mississippi

Talking Salad

Oscar Wilde once said “When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” For many, this is much hoped for money that is inherited from a lost loved one or a job that creates more problems than it solves. For one vegetarian animal rights activist, the gods had bigger plans. She would pray at night that the savages of the world would understand the suffering their food endured before reaching its plate. In the morning, her soy latte bemoaned the pain of being ground and boiled and her salad lunch cried at the agonies of being ripped from the mother vine and hacked to bits while still fresh and alive. By dinner, her perspective on food had completely changed. She would eat only nuts and fruit that had fallen from the tree, and of course meat she killed herself, the free range cow having had a fair chance to fight back.

- Originally mailed to K. Ballard of Owensborough, Kentucky

Advice Wall

When a man finds himself stuck, he often seeks answers from a power beyond himself. Many pray, but there are other systems of mystical divination. The Chinese had the I Ching. Europeans had the tarot, the Norse their rune casting. Americans had the Magic 8-Ball. Down beneath the Exit 26 overpass just outside of Johnsonville stood the Advice Wall, a large expanse of concrete covered in words and phrases, painted on by kids long forgotten. Teenagers, who find themselves confused and needing guidance more than most, would follow the abandoned railroad tracks to the advice wall with a water balloon in hand, and pose their question to the sagely stone. Then, with their eyes closed, they would lob the balloon at the wall, and where the water hit, there they found guidance. Many swore by it, particularly Mayor Filmont, who as a kid fresh out of high school asked the wall what he should do with his life and was told, “iTs youR towN.”

- Originally mailed to P. Brown of Clovis, New Mexico

Closets

Miranda Tully didn't believe in closets. Oh, she knew they existed, but disagreed with them on principle. Too many connotations of secrets and shames long hidden. Skeletons in the closet, closet alcoholics. She wouldn't abide a closet's use in her home. Instead, she would pile and stack things in front of them, which she realized hid the place where shame hid. The closet became her secret, for to even have them suggested she encouraged such deceptions.

“Oh,” her friends would say. “I never realized there was a door back there.”

And Miranda would blush for shame.

- Originally mailed to L. Sims of Hattiesburg, MS