Draft 1
What if an envelope arrived to your name and address, but inside was a letter written to someone else thirty years ago?
(I'll finish this tomorrow. It was to be an excercise, but it quickly graduated to a story.)
She enjoyed eating cereal for dinner. It was simple, after a long day, nutritious, and excitingly cold. She loved cold foods, especially cold beverages. In her pantry were ten boxes of cereal, and thirteen types of tea from which she could brew iced tea. She would mix the teas--though not all would mix well, such as pumpkin and jasmine--and so have, for her purposes, and infinite variety.
She mixed the cereals, too. Tonight, it was Cap'n Crunch and Alpha-bits. A dessert cereal.
She had measured the portions from the captain's box, and the box of glyphs, in her traditional two-to-one ratio. Outside, she heard steps, glanced at the clock, waited for the metallic scratch then slam.
Six oh five. She secretly believed that the postman could deliver her mail in early afternoon, but instead brought it at this time in hopes of meeting her. He was cute, but married (she'd asked a neighbor), and so she was never outside when he arrived.
She did, however, get the mail soon after it was delivered, wondering if he was somewhere nearby, watching. Creepy? Or nice? She imagined him sighing, then getting into the right hand side of his little truck and driving home, unable to easily stop at a drive through for dinner. Instead, she hoped he would go to a coffee shop, order a caramel latte and a scone, and worry about the days when she received no letters, ispping the hot beverage cautiously.
Hot beverages belonged to others, in her view. She placed the milk in the freezer, set the microwave timer for ten minutes, and went outside to get her delivery.
There was one letter, posted to her five days ago, with no return address. She'd have taken it for junk mail, except that it was hand addressed. The most accursed thing she'd seen in the last seven years were junk letters printed to look as if they were hand addressed, and worse, hand written.
Five days ago would be from somewhere on the coast. Or, maybe it got lost.
Or maybe the postman kept it in reserve one day, when she really had two letters, kept it aside so that, if an upcoming day was empty, he could still deliver to her.
She opened the envelope with a table knife, and slipped out the paper. The microwave numbers showed eight more minutes. The paper was brownish, and wide ruled. There were four sheets. She could smell the paper, too, and it smelled as if it had been too near a welder's work. She saw, briefly, two iron bars in clamps, and that tight sun fusing them together.
The paper seemed brittle, too, but not so much that it would fall apart. She unfolded carefully. The writing was big, funny looking.
Childish, that was it. The front page said, "Dear Grandma".
In older books, and some movies, they talk about the breath catching in the throat. A "sudden intake", as if the person were blowing a balloon and suddenly relaxed and let the air reenter the lungs. Not quite the opposite of a cough, or a sigh, but some blending of the two. Perhaps the opposite of a gasp. And yet, the two, one explosive the other vacuumed, have the same gripping connotation. Surprise, shock, dismay, the startling realization that something is wrong, but you can't be sure what it is.
Her breath did this, then she released it quietly through her open lips. Not a whistle. An airy gesture of wonder.
In a few minutes her milk would be ready. She could read the letter before then.
Draft 2