He writes a select, specific little horror each day. He does it on a single sheet of paper, which he then folds carefully inward to be its own envelope, and he sends it off. He writes precisely but not prettily in ink from a tarnished inkwell. He writes after reading the newspaper but before eating anything, so he can keep his edge.
***
He began by sending his horrors to publications – magazines and newspapers alike, indiscriminate – but it was never clear whether he meant their thick mucus bile and slowly loosening teeth for publication or as a threat. And then he began on the other addresses. Grocery stores and hair salons and addresses he assumed existed: Main St, Sometown, Kansas.
When he was done with each day’s writing, he left for a job so ordinary that it doesn’t matter what it was. On his way he bought a single stamp for each horror as part of the ritual and mailed them at the post office. He wore prescription glasses that turned dark when he went outside and stayed just slightly tinted in the harsh florescent light of his workplace. At lunch he ate outside if the sun wasn’t too bright, a bologna sandwich and an apple, or an orange already peeled and put in a baggy. He picked the white fibers off and left them on the bench. After work he drove home and sat in his quiet house and looked at the wall where a television might have been.
***
One morning like any of the others, he was outside the post office waiting for a clerk to unlock the door when a car pulled up. Before that day he had always waited alone. He held his envelope a little closer and looked around, confused. The town was small and humid, with great hanks of moss on the trees and people driving slowly past on their way to work. The clerks moved slowly inside just to spite him, he was certain.
The new car produced a woman in a dress with a frill all the way around the skirt and two bows in her hair, which was in pigtails like a child. She was not a child. She might have been even a little older than he was. From the trunk of her little car, she produced a box with a frill on it just like her skirt, and she came and stood behind him to wait for the Post Office to open.
“Nice morning,” she said.
He nodded without looking back at her.
“Like to hear the bugs already doing their thing, even though it means it’ll be a hot one.”
He made a smaller nod so as not to encourage her.
“I hope they open soon so these cupcakes don’t melt before I can get a little insulation around them,” she said.
He turned farther away from her.
“You must be a business owner too, waiting like this before they even open the door,” she said.
“I’m a writer,” he said.
“A writer! You must have so much fun. I loved writing in school, just never kept up with it. I wrote a story once for a creative writing assignment that the teacher liked so much she sent it to a kids’ magazine, would you believe that? It was about a boy and his golden retriever. But that’s small potatoes for you, probably. Have you written anything I might have seen? Anything adapted into a movie?”
“Not into a movie,” he said.
“Well you’ll get there!” she said. “Don’t you ever give up. If I’d have given up on this cupcake business, where would I be? Still living with my ex-husband and his model trains, that’s what! Now look at me, I run the internet’s most popular astral-aura-based custom cupcake business.”
He looked at the door and saw it was still marked CLOSED.
“When people order, they fill out a little questionnaire, and I design cupcakes to match their aura based on their answers! It’s so uplifting for them, to see themselves reflected in a cupcake.”
They heard the door unlock. He went inside, bought his stamp, and put his horror in the slot. He stood by the slot for a moment like he always did, imagining it oozing its way toward the mail truck, imagining it snaking its way toward the mail truck, imagining it sprouting hairy legs and scuttling its way bug-like toward the mail truck, but he could hear the cupcake woman talking and couldn’t imagine quite as well.
***
From then on, when he wrote, he thought of her. He thought of her cupcakes gone sour, her cupcakes frosted with slime and puss, her cupcakes filled with grubs, her cupcakes poison on her tongue and the tongues of anyone who filled out her questionnaire. He thought of her opening one of his horrors and collapsing upon herself, shriveling into herself, peeling apart and drifting dry and weightless into the wind like spiders riding strands of web.
He sent the horrors she inspired, at first, randomly like he’d been sending horrors all along, but from that day on she was at the Post Office so often that he wondered if he could send them to her. On Sundays when the Post Office was closed he paced his house and tore his hair.
He could write a kindness, he thought, instead of a horror. A cupcake of a story, a light and fluffy niceness, so he sat and wrote and almost gagged on the sugar and vanilla and rosewater, and when he stepped back from it he saw it was more horrible than the horrors and he ran holding it by its corner into his overgrown backyard and dug with his hands like a dog and buried it.
***
He wrote every horror for her, a bucket of blood to offer to her, and he mailed them to addresses in his own town so she might receive them. He worked his way up and down the streets one day at a time. He was tempted to send more than one a day, but he slowed himself with some deep breaths and focused on one at a time. The grinding of joints and the smell of foul breath. The process must remain the same. Each one receiving its full share of him.
When he saw her at the Post Office he watched her while he put the horror in its slot and wondered if it would be the one to reach her and if he would know if it did. One day she saw him watching her and whispered something to the clerk. The clerk shook his head and whispered something back. She didn’t come to the Post Office in the mornings after that.
He saw her car, once, with its cupcake graphics, driving past, so he knew she hadn’t moved away.
He wrote horrors. He sent them. Sometimes he forgot her and sank deep into them, and sometimes he couldn’t think of anything or anyone else.
He started wearing a tie to work. He cleaned his glasses with the tail of it. He was moved to a new cubicle in the hallway where people passed him, always talking, a hundred times a day. Sometimes when they were loud, he sat flat footed in his office chair and dreamt of sending them horrors, but he dug his fingernails into his wrist and told himself to remain true to the cupcake woman. They might receive a horror by chance. If he sent one to the entire town, they surely would eventually. He pulled his fingernails out of his arm and looked at the graceful curve of their marks.
***
He wrote his finest horrors. His art, his symphony, his masterpieces.
He opened his mailbox and sorted through the fliers and bills. Offers for an AC tune-up, fire station fundraisers. And below them all, like it was hiding on purpose, a piece of paper folded in on itself and stamped and addressed in his own looping hand.
He thought they had returned it to him because of a problem delivering it. But no, there was no return address on it. It was addressed to him.
He began to shake. He began to sweat as cold as sweat could be.
“One to everyone in town,” he whispered. “I forgot I live in this town too.”
He sat down on the floor and looked at the spot on the wall where a TV might have been. He knew he had to open it, but he put it off. He looked at the wall. He meditated with low moanings and groanings. He got up and cleaned the sink. It had never been cleaned before. He thought he could write a horror about it. But he knew he was finished.
He went upstairs and put his things in order. Fingernails saved in bags, rats in jars, family pictures crossed out with blades. He wanted to go for a walk. But he’d delayed as long as he could. It was tugging at him.
He went downstairs and opened the horror, and when he did he fell backwards onto the floor.