Hi there, Postman Cole again.
I am responsible for delivering mail to the lower half of our strange bayside town of Lyttle. Mind you, there’s quite a lot of mail for a place where the only way in and out of the town has collapsed (the highway tunnel). This happened a few years ago, trapping all residents inside the bay. Did I mention that there probably are a few beasts living around here which have elected to communicate by archaic scribbles? So yeah, I’m quite busy as a postman. But apparently, according to Mrs. Landry, I am also the police.
The old lady came barging into my post office at around quarter-past eight carrying her arms in a cradle.
“What’s the matter, Mrs. Landry?”
“Oh, it’s about my cat. I want to find out what’s wrong with her.” Her wiry eyebrows danced as she spoke. She was one of those eyebrow dancers.
The pile of letters that I pushed to the side looked like a sad, flattened snowman. “Where is she?”
“She’s here, honey.”
Her eyebrows were jumping, they were waltzing.
No cat. Of course, there was no cat.
“Oh,” I put my hand over the back of hers. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Landry.”
Her eyebrows: Flattened to a frown.
“Is she…” I looked around the room, pretending to see spirits. “Is she with us, here in this room?”
The woman’s expression looked as if I had just torn up her winning bingo card.
Thin red lines blossomed over her forearms as she wrestled with the air for a while. Scratches, all etched into wrinkled skin. Some time ago, such a thing might have given me a jump. But as it stands, in a peculiar town that often has rainy spells with a chance of bees, this was the least surprising thing I had seen all week.
“Will you quiet down?” She snapped. “You’re scaring Cleo!”
I spent a while leaning over my desk staring at her hugged arms until I began to make out something. A shape: it was a heart of sorts. A tiny, beating heart suspended by nothingness, enveloped by a glasslike veil I could just barely make out clutching onto the front of her flowery blouse.
Her eyebrows waved as if to say, ‘I told you’. She absent-mindedly stroked the invisible feline.
Alright, so I guess I’m Cole: Postman, beast slayer, translucent pet-vet extraordinaire.
“Listen, I’m sorry, Mrs. Landry, but I’m not the authorities. I’m just a mailman. Have you tried taking it up with them?”
“Oh, dear,” She shook her head. “How I’ve tried. I can’t make it to upper town, not on these old legs. So, I sent my granddaughter. She said the place is closed shut, that they’re undergoing some sort of maintenance at the station.”
Again, I began sorting the envelopes by address. “Okay, I’ll go check out the station after my deliveries are done, Mrs. Landry. Just for you.”
She nodded and made to leave before stopping at the door as the bells chimed against the glass. “Be careful, honey. Especially careful around all the bodies and the goo.”
“What? Hey-“ I yelled for her, but she was already gone. My eyes could only follow her sunflower-spotted top wriggle in the wind as she crossed the street.
I sat there for a while until I had finished sorting my papers with a screwed-up face. Goo? What on earth was she talking about?
The letters slipped into my mailbag with ease; I fastened my blue and white postal hat on as I did every morning before setting off to work.
And then it hit me: I had no clue where the police station actually was.
I mean, that’s probably something I should have known. Lyttle is a tiny place, and there’s only one building, a handful of officers.
On the other hand, there wasn’t any maps of the roads here. We were just expected to know where everything was.
Had it been because I only worked the bottom half of the city close to the bay? Those streets I knew like the back of my hand.
Nevertheless, with a face that was still stuck sour, I fastened my bag around my waist and stepped out onto the hot, summer street. I didn’t know where the police station was, but I knew exactly who would.
On my jog uphill to the hospital, between my odd delivery, I had seen the usual weird things that had begun to sprout all across town.
For one, outside Sleepy Bear Daycare a few streets down around the block, I was stopped by a cacophony of giggling. Which was nothing new, of course. But what was new was the splashing. Loud, fun splashing. I turned my head to find that the kids had spilled out of the center with leashes in their hands, taking toads that were as big as my hat out for a swim in the nearby fountain.
I thought more people would stop and look. Was I the only person seeing this? I suppose I did get a snort from an elderly man as he made his way past me.
“Eh, children these days.” He said, before proceeding to walk into the horizon that faced the sparking sapphire water of the bay in the distance, using only his cane as an aid (which for the record, was an onyx-black cobra). It slithered on the small space below his feet as it met the ground, propelling him forward or not, I am still not sure.
The strangest thing of all might have been the balding man I spotted on Western Ave. He was in his forties - the sun beaming down and shining off the space between his thin strands of blonde hair. He had begun to gather a crowd around a large red fire hydrant he had spray painted an off-white bone. According to his yelping voice, along with his preaching grand gestures with his hands: The end was nigh, the water that once flowed free from our taps had turned to ice, fish had begun to migrate upstream into our toilets. And for just two dollars, we could be blessed by drinking from the pure, untainted non-apocalyptic water of the Western Ave fire hydrant.
But no, of course, that was just Jim. Yeah, he had been doing that sort of thing for a while, longer than the tunnel had been collapsed. We sort of just moved around him on the sidewalk, as you would a toppled tree or a spot of bird droppings. People were getting really tired of Jim.
When I had finally reached the hospital, it was around quarter to eleven. Tom was sitting up against his hospital bed, his face even more pale than usual, with skin feverish and darted with beads of sweat. Below him: What remained of his arm bandaged in a white sling.
“Took you long enough to come visit.” He croaked.
I sat on the chair beside him. “Glad you’re good, Tom. Listen, I need your help with something, man.”
His frown was even more furrowed than Mrs. Landry’s.
“Cole? The hell, man? I’m missing a goddamn arm over here.”
“Yeah, yeah right… No, I get that.” I sighed. “But it could be worse. We could be missing our jobs.”
We sat and talked for a while. He was understandably angry, but I told Tom that there was something going on at the police station. I explained that we needed to check it out before Lyttle’s society inevitably collapsed into lawless chaos. And chaos was no good for postage deliveries. No postage deliveries meant no work, and no work meant we’ll be shelling out the big bucks just to drink some fire hydrant water by the sidewalk.
“You’re insane, Cole.” He began slipping on his shoes. “No really, you’re insane. I’ll show you where the police station is, and that’s it.”
I gave him a thankful I-owe-you-one nod, and before long we were off.
The few blocks before the police building were deserted. Seeing oddities was one thing, seeing absolutely none in Lyttle after this long was something entirely different. It was harrowing.
Before us at the end of Clyve Street was the building. It was grand and towering (I suppose in Lyttle, grand means it was two stories high with a garage). Most windows were boarded up, save for a few of the windows on the second floor which were outlandishly dark for such a stunningly blue-skied morning.
The door of the building rattled with a metallic clang as I knocked. No answer. I called out for a while, but no-one opened up. Just like the old lady had told me.
I turned to my partner. “Alright, lift me up onto the balcony.”
“No! Screw that, Cole.”
“Stop being such a baby, Tom – I’m the one who has to deliver your bloody letters, man.”
He was mumbling curses as he bent a shoulder for me. This was definitely not a favor he was going to forget anytime soon. Hell, at this rate, he’d make me pay off my debt by watching that sci-fi movie about living in a computer simulation, the one with the green numbers. I mean, watch it again. Probably stoned this time. God dammit.
I crunched the smashed glass under my sneakers as I made away across the balcony and in through the window. The first thing that hit me was the stench of rotten vegetables. Not human decomposition, like Mrs. Landry had said. But it was foul. Secondly was the slime. It covered the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Big glops of sage goo that cascaded slowly with a viscous drip.
My legs gave way as I began to climb down the stairs through the hallway, there was too much of the stuff. It was beneath my feet everywhere I looked. I almost came tumbling down through a window that had been luckily boarded with wood.
I reached the front door from the inside and opened the handful of locks with a clack. The sun outside was blinding; when my eyes adjusted, I saw Tom staring at the green gunk on me, shaking his head with a pout, disapprovingly like I was a toddler that had just crayoned the walls.
He knew what I was going to say.
“No way, Cole.”
“But you need to help me loo-“
“Seriously, no way.”
“Fine, big baby.” I headed back inside.
If I could find something, anything at all, that would tell me if there was still some law enforcement alive and working in Lyttle, I would be satisfied. I had to know, I had to know if I needed to prepare for the worst: The fire hydrant water.
Better start making friends with Jim early and get the discounts, you newly homeless bum.
“Hello?” I called.
There might have been an echo if the police station wasn’t so inundated and insulated with green rubber. I went to turn the door handle to the armory; my hands came away sticky and coated, webbed.
Inside the armory was a man slumped forward from his office chair in front of the security camera setup and beside the case full of guns. Below his neck was a tilted nametag: RODNEY.
“Hey, sir, everything alright in here?”
Nothing. My chest began to draw tight.
“Your, uh, civilian clientele, have been spilling over to the post office for detective work.”
His face was sickly white, lips stuck shut. Body probably cold, and his voice: Not even a zip.
“Probably fell asleep, huh. That’s uh, not static, on the camera’s sir, that’s… just goo.”
Nada.
Without warning, the back of his blue uniform began to peel free from the thickly coated seat. He turned his head to me, his eyes revoltingly stripping free. Lime fingers slipped out his sockets like that of a snail, and if he saw me, I couldn’t know, he was only groaning with a liquid-filled throat, one overdue for a cough.
“Tom!” I shouted.
My ankle caught the leg of a body I hadn’t seen lying there in the mushy green carpet. I went falling onto my back, crawling then not at all. Lying flat.
I tried to scream for Tom from where I was, but my shoulders wouldn’t unstick, my shirt wouldn’t come loose. It was sage quicksand, swallowing me, eating me. And with each breath, it felt like my heart was giving out. I wasn’t a postman anymore, I was becoming something different, perhaps a paranormal investigator. And to be frank, as I stared up at the officer’s hands which hung loose as growing, swerving lime-green anacondas, I kind of hated my job.
I heard Tom’s steps running. Bless him, as bad as I had treated him up until that point, he was actually running.
The arms of the officer had wrapped around my legs as thick unkept grapevines. I could feel my muscles beginning to squish; my bones had begun to creak. They were about to crack.
“Fuck sakes, Cole. Not this again.” He sighed.
“The gun case, in the armory!”
Tom elbowed the thing in the head as he pushed past into the room, the eyes of the beast went swinging like long lime pendulums.
My postage partner wrestled with the cage for a while, and before long he turned around aiming down sight as if out of a western cowboy flick.
Click, click, bang.
Wet chunks of green coated my tongue, my throat.
Click, click, bang.
It wouldn’t die. Why would it? But Tom’s great shooting bought me enough time to clamber to my feet.
We stood there shaking for a while, watching the officer contort and grow.
I took one of the long, unworldly pool-noodle arms by its side and wrapped it around its head like a scarf. Pulling, pulling until the thing’s head dropped loose and rolled.
“Pass me your lighter!” I shouted.
“Why?”
“Tom, just give me it.”
He tossed the tiny hunk of metal from his pocket. I missed the catch, but it stuck to my shoulder like Velcro.
I flicked it open - the flame came alive, so did the room. The fire blossomed green then blue as it burned the flesh of the reanimating monstrosity.
For a while, and for a while after that, we stood outside and watched the building engulf itself in flames before collapsing.
That night, Tom and I decided to sit by the fireplace of the post-office, where we were safe from the molding goo upon our clothes. We drank bourbon that warmed our bellies, and thought of what was coming, and who we were turning into.
But I’m going to be honest here; the whole ordeal was far from the strangest thing that has happened to me.
There’s so much more to see.
I can only hope that my small bayside town holds up with no-one to enforce law and order, and that Tom doesn’t make me watch that movie with him to pay off my debt.
While people are still scrambling to sell the rare, orange-colored oranges at the market that they find amongst the invasive, purple-colored breed that is taking over town, I’ll still have more stories to tell. While there is still talk of Mr. Jones’s convenience store selling gum that makes customers grow eyes or see into the future, I’ll definitely have more stories to tell.
For now, I need to take a shower to wipe the green muck away. After that, maybe deliver some mail. Perhaps investigate the paranormal, it seems.
Sincerely,
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Credits
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