This week’s prompt was: A person receives a birthday card and a holiday card every year, but from whom? It is never signed and no matter where the receiver moves, these anonymous greetings follow.

Break Down Letters

Sandra felt the long hours at the lab in her shuffling feet, in her bag slapping her ankle as she walked up the four unreasonably long and widely spaced steps to the front door of her colonial-revival.  She paused long enough to notice a fleck of paint near the bottom of the right-hand column, just above the pediment, that she had been meaning to touch up since October.  Too late now, she thought.

Inside, she dropped her bag on the foyer table, took three steps, groaned and then went back for it; her face contorted into the same petulant frown she had lavished on her mother when told to pick up her things as a child.  She all but stomped up the stairs.  Late nights with a particle accelerator all week so she could come home early, so nothing was left undone, nothing to burden anyone at the lab with because she was gone, and now she was tired as hell and had a long awaited night, difficult in one sense, ahead of her.

She changed into sweats and a t-shirt, relieved at least to be out of her bra and its guillotine-like underwire, and began to clean the front room.  She heard steps outside, down on the sidewalk, and trotted over to the window.  Kids; it was still early for the mailman.

The letters had started five years ago.  She had met Jason in college, both studying mathematics.  As one of few women in a program still dominated by men, she had her pick of socially awkward “nice guys” and somewhat more honest, openly hostile misogynists.  Jason stood out, though.  The shy smile was a touch theatrical: he knew how attractive he was.  Years of perfect grades, winning academic competitions, scholarships to the finest universities in the world offered without his even applying to some had all lifted the confidence of this once cripplingly insecure boy, providing just the support he needed to become an ambitious young man.  He couldn’t hide his sweating palms, though, when his offer for a drink was accepted and she showed none of the signs of reluctance he seemed to expect.  She liked that, too.  Their interests were eerily similar, from books to movies, music to food, they even had the same irrational dislike of puppets!  A typically passionate college romance ensued, following the playbook that both of them seemed comfortable conforming to.  By senior year, though, Sandra had grown beyond the playbook and looked forward to the challenges of career and wondered hopefully about what she had yet to discover about life.  She faced facts: though Jason was every bit her equal intellectually, challenged her ideas in a Socratic way, he had chosen a trajectory through life that seemed to her as predictable as their conversations had become.  She ended it after finals and Jason didn’t take it particularly well.

Sandra shook her head as she let the drapes fall back into place.  She turned and took in her living room: what a mess, she thought.  It wasn’t really, not by the standards of most of her contemporaries.  But she had a vision of strangers entering her house and seeing the dust, the blur of microscopic bunnies on her rugs, fingerprints on her lamps, and the thought of people seeing she’d left a mess behind gave her a sense of subtle shame.  Not me, she thought and pulled the vacuum cleaner out of the hall closet.

Over the summer between undergraduate and her PhD program, Jason had called and called, emailed more than a spammer, and even threatened to show up at her hotel when she vacationed in Florida.  She finally answered the phone, her parents near her in the room to offer their support, only to have her stern “Hello” greeted by a shower of sobbing pleas for forgiveness.  He had acted like an ass, a child, a weirdo of the first water.  Two months away from each other, with no one else fulfilling a boyfriend’s duties, and the unexpectedness of his admission of guilt wrung an equally unexpected forgiveness from her.  Loneliness, the needs of the body, and an openly irrational fantasy that she might make it work with him did even more: she made a mistake and agreed to meet him.  He came, they talked, they spent the night together but in the morning she knew again that it wasn’t right.  She tried to say nothing definite until he returned home but he wouldn’t be denied his pain and forced the issue.  She broke it off again, broke off what she had not thought to be reattached in the first place.  He took that even worse.

“Could anyone possibly care what my kitchen floor looks like?” Sandra asked herself as she stood at its doorway and noticed a faint darkness to the tile.  She shook her head and wondered if this was really important or if she was just stalling.  More steps outside.  She jogged to the door but again, no mailman.  She checked the mantle clock: another half hour, probably.

She had entered her PhD program in particle physics, taking a little flat off-campus.  When she had returned from birthday barhopping with the girls, she found the first letter.  It wouldn’t have been difficult for Jason to find out where she lived; anyone of their mutual friends could have told him, despite the general knowledge of his behavior.  But somehow she knew that wasn’t how he’d learned of her whereabouts.  She’d heard from a friend that he’d joined the NSA, the National Security Administration, the country’s center of electronic surveillance.  His math skills would have been highly sought after by their cryptography section.  The letter tried for irony but wallowed in sarcasm; where he clearly hoped to instill a pang of loss—of the future they could have had—instead he instilled only revulsion; his graphically detailed recounting of their sex life may have been an attempt at passion but made her head spin in a sudden bout of nausea.  She returned home for Christmas to find another such letter delivered Christmas Eve.

The floor washed, the refrigerator cleared out, and the garbage bag changed, Sandra washed her hands and then began preparing dinner.  “I always said this would be my last meal,” she murmured as she set out the cutting board and her knives.  “Creepy, I guess, but it is my best.”  It had been Jason’s favorite, too, at one time.  A knock came at the door.  Setting aside the onion she was peeling, she went to the door.  The postman needed her to sign for the letter.  That was a newer wrinkle: the first few years he’d always used standard post, getting lucky on the timing, she supposed.  Now he sent them guaranteed next day.  “Thank you,” she told the postman, smiling, and closed the door.  She looked at the empty place where the return address should have been.  It didn’t matter; the postal receipt had a Washington DC Post Office tag.  She set the letter on the foyer table, patting it gently, her face still and her eyes seeing far more than the envelope.

She didn’t go out with the girls that often after the first letter.  She had nightmares about Jason using traffic cameras to trace her way through the city, dispatching police to follow her when she drove, and listening to her phone calls.  At first she pretended her studies and research prevented her from joining the gang but soon her reluctance was interpreted as snobbishness.  She felt isolated after that, but not alone.  Alone seemed a luxury she would never again enjoy.  Despite the tax it levied on her concentration, she found once she got going that she was as gifted as ever and could lose herself in her work.  For a few hours a day in the lab, she forgot all about Jason.  She couldn’t bring herself to throw away the letters, though; some vague thought of evidence.  And so whenever she returned to her flat, she couldn’t help but look at the drawer in her antique roll-top desk where they lie.

As she stirred the sauce for the pasta course, a sudden and unexpectedly large bubble burst, sending tomato across her t-shirt—and a little bit dripping onto her gun.  “Goddamn it,” she growled through grinding teeth.  She used the dishtowel to wipe the slide of her H&K .45—luckily the blob landed forward of the ejector port, so no need for a strip and clean—and then made a modern art masterpiece of her t-shirt.  “Arrg, what does it matter?” she sighed and tossed the towel toward the sink.

When her next birthday had rolled around, she had told herself not to think of the last one, not to give in to his attempt to make her afraid.  The memory had faded a little in the last month, or she told herself it had, and she had looked forward to having a normal birthday and trying to turn over a new leaf, return to a social life.  In her mailbox was another letter from Jason.  It didn’t have his name on it, just like the last one, but she knew it was from him.  She suspected that even a police sweep of the envelope and paper would find no fingerprints of trace DNA.  He would never let something so elementary slip by.  Not when sending a letter in which he vividly imagined her brutal death.

She began to flinch at loud noises after that letter, to back into doorways on the street if a car drove up to the curb near her.  Though she was asked out once a month, she couldn’t bring herself to accept: the very thought of intimacy with a man frightened her, as if it would warrant a greater punishment from Jason.  The lab, once a place of peace and work-induced happiness, a refuge, had became a maze of likely ambushes.  Her nightmares increased, sometimes taking place in the lab instead of her flat.  Her work suffered and her advisor took her aside to inquire: she couldn’t tell him.  Part of her felt ashamed to have let Jason get to her this way but another part was certain, no matter how supportive the staff at the lab might seem, she would be shunted off to the side, cast as another hysterical woman trying to break into a career unsuited to her gender, it she told anyone.  Though she thought of quitting and going home, her fear of what would happen to her if she surrendered her dream—what made her who she was—was more terrifying than Jason’s letters.  She found another that Christmas at home.

The duck was in the oven and the timer set.  Sandra set the table, using her best china and her finest linen.  She stepped back to inspect everything and remembered in a panic that she was still wearing her stained shirt and sweats.  “Comfortable as these are,” she said to the empty room, “somehow I don’t think they go with the occasion.”  She ran up the stairs to her bedroom, to the outfit she had set aside for this night.

Returning for the final year of her PhD, she moved.  Her new apartment had been further from the university but it was closer to the police station.  Her parents had insisted but she had felt that it would do no good.  She knew that whatever she did, Jason would know about it and find her.  As her birthday approached, she found herself daydreaming about what it would be like if he broke into her apartment at last; if she would be afraid when he drew the knife or if she’d feel relieved.  The depth of his description, the intimacy of the crime he had related to her in his last letter had so impressed itself on her mind that she had trouble seeing it as the fantasy of a tormenter and not an inevitable conclusion to her life.  The next letter arrived at her new apartment and she had to sign for it.  It was as if the sound had been turned off on her life: the mailman’s lips moved but she couldn’t hear the words; she closed the door, dropped the chain without attaching it, but neither made a noise; she slowly tore open the envelope, feeling the vibration in her fingers but not hearing the slither of parting paper.  He began with a parody of missing her that descended into violation, ending with the sentence: “All because you left.”

The hot shower felt good on her aching muscles.  Sandra lathered herself twice just to have an excuse for rubbing the knots and spots of tenderness that the long week had given her.  Only the oven timer and the thought of ruining all her hard work dragged her out into the steam-filled bathroom—that and her mind was running to certain intimate matters in which it would not do to indulge, not this night.  She wiped the mirror until she could see herself and then let the towel fall.  She could almost not see the parts of her figure she was less than pleased with.  She threw the towel at the mirror, laughed and ran on tip toes to her dresser in the next room.

After the letter that had found her in her new apartment near the police station, Sandra decided not to go home for Christmas.  She lied and told her parents that no letter had come, that this move must have done the trick.  Her father had surmised Jason had been fired from the NSA, not telling her of his letters to the organization.  She said that must be it.  She figured if she were not in the safety of her home, but alone that Christmas, maybe he would make good on his threats.  As November became December, she found herself longing for him to deliver his next letter personally; to surrender the fight and leave the anxiety, the ceaseless, unrelenting fear even if it meant leaving it in death.  Tears overwhelmed her one night, a week before the letter was due to arrive, when she wondered what she’d do if he didn’t come.  In a fantasy like intoxication, heady as if looking over a precipice, she saw herself driving to DC, presenting herself to the security desk at the NSA.  Curled up sleepless in her bed, she had whispered over and over that she just wanted it to be over.  Breaking glass brought an end to her mantra.

That she had found a lipstick so perfectly flattering to her skin tone in the pharmacy still boggled her mind, as she applied it carefully in front of her now de-steamed bathroom mirror.  She’d blown out her hair, took a pencil to the ends of her eyebrows, foundationed, blushed, eyelined, and with a little color to her lips she would be good to go.  She pouted and then smiled, tried a few different looks—interested glances, coy gazes, biting the edge of her lower lip—until her silliness caused her to dissolve into laughter.  “Not the time, baby,” she told herself and then froze at a sound below.

Next to the police station or not, someone had broken into her apartment while she was at university—while she was at home.  The tears she had shed dried in a sudden heated rage: someone had forced his way into her space.  Jason or someone else, she would not allow it to go unpunished.  She threw herself out of bed, screaming “You motherfucker!”  Looking around her bedroom, she could find no better weapon than the lamp on her nightstand.  Smacking off its floral shade, she quickly wrapped the cord around the stem and hefted the heavy brass base.  Tears of an entirely new sort stung her eyes as she bounded to the bedroom door and out into the living room.  The broken window’s glass lie on the couch, the cushions disarranged from the would-be burglar’s escape.  Flipping on the light, she saw that nothing was taken; peering out the window, she saw a Honda tearing away from the curb.  She laughed, almost hopelessly at first and then crumbled into tears that grew into laughter again, laughter so hilarious she couldn’t catch her breath.  She rolled on the floor, banging the table lamp/club and sputtering ludicrous commentary about her “Brave heart” battle cry and Amazonian prowess with household goods.  She also called the cops, who were understandably chagrined at a break-in happening so close to their station.  The burglar was caught three weeks later.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Sandra cried as she took the stairs two at a time going down to the kitchen.  “I’m here, don’t burn!”  The timer sang merrily as she slid in her stalking feet to a halt before the oven.  The duck was perfectly cooked: the skin crispy, the flesh succulent, and the sliced potatoes underneath, which had absorbed the dripping duck fat, the most scrumptious of all.  “Oh my god, this smells so good I may really come,” she said, setting the hot and heavy pan on the stone pad she’d prepositioned on the counter.  Her smile slid from her face a moment later when she slapped her hip and her hand didn’t land on her pistol.

After her Christmas Eve break-in, Sandra had applied for a concealed carry license and began carrying a pistol with her at all times.  She took classes in firearms, self-defense techniques—both physical and situational awareness training—and the results were more than she could have imagined.  She not only walked down the street with more confidence, she brought the new-found sense of agency to her studies, her life.  She made up for her lost time in the lab and wrote a dissertation the likes of which she had not imagined herself capable.  In defending it, she held the eye of every professor who spoke to her until he dropped her gaze—and never let their gotchya questions rattle her.  She had come prepared for battle, well-versed and better read on her particular brand of particle theory and the professors knew it.  At the end of her defense, they joked that it hadn’t been quite as bad as they had expected, wiping their brows and asking her how they did.  She got the joke; she had made a bit of a reputation for herself; she laughed right along with them and then asked which one had the balls to give her a job at their private research laboratories.  Her audacity was rewarded with a row of raised hands.

As Sandra came down the stairs to peak in at the mantle clock, the doorbell chimed.  She smiled and swallowed a laugh, the butterflies in her stomach just fluttery enough they were a pleasure.  Hand on her H&K, she looked through the peephole and saw Drew.  Opening the door, she saw he wore what must have been a brand new suit and he looked so tall and fit, trim and well put together, that she bit the side of her lip in an entirely unrehearsed way.

“Look at you,” he said, his broad smile as honest as hers, taking real pleasure in the sight of her.  As his eyes reached her waist and saw the gun, they bulged a bit for a second and then he comically pulled at his tie and said, “Beautiful, well-dressed, and armed.  I better behave myself.”

She laughed and beckoned him in, noticing only once he was inside that he was carrying flowers: a dozen roses.  “Thank you!” she said, taking and briefly smelling them.  Meeting his eyes, she said, “You look so good, baby,” and rose up on her toes to kiss him gently, teasingly with only a brush of the lips.

“Just trying to keep up with you,” he said and he looked like he was keeping up just fine with what she was thinking but his hands froze as he reached for her waist.  “Um, do you always wear that thing?”

She looked down at his hands retreating from her and grabbed him by the wrist.  Tossing the flowers in a dry china vase on the foyer table, she stepped between his hands and put them around her.  “Don’t be scared,” she whispered and laughed a little with him as they kissed more passionately.  She breathed throatily as they parted and said, “You look good in my lipstick, too.”  They laughed again as he wiped his mouth and she led him into the living room, to the couch and a glass of Armagnac.

“I know people probably talk about my carrying a gun at the lab, and you must have questions,” she said as she lay an arm across the back of the couch and played her fingers through his hair.  “I guess, if I’m being honest, that I’ve moved so slow with you because it’s always a bit of a mystery how a man will react.”

“I have wondered if something happened,” he said, trying not to load too much emphasis on any one word, seem as if he would be shocked or repulsed by what she might say; he wondered how he would feel.

“Yeah,” she said lightly.  “But nothing so horrible.  Oh, I forgot something.  Hold on.”  She ran into the foyer and retrieved Jason’s most recent letter.

She sat down on the couch, closer than she had been before, and looked frankly into his eyes.  She tapped the thick envelope against her knuckles, waited for him to look at it and then back at her, before she began.  “I call them break down letters,” she said.  “A boyfriend I had in college, my first real relationship, didn’t take our breakup that well.  Started writing these to me, twice a year, no matter where I move.”

“What?” Drew said.  “That’s outrageous!  Have you confronted him?”

She wrinkled her nose and laughed silently.  “No,” she said.  “He doesn’t sign them and he’s way too smart to have left any identifying marks.  He’s with the NSA so pinning them on him is all but impossible.  I’m not worried about that.”

“What’s in these letters?” Drew asked.  “Or don’t I want to know.”

“He sends them to rattle me,” she said, “to punish me for not being with him.  And knowing you the way I do, yeah, you may not want to know what’s in them.  But you can read them if you want, if you feel you need to.”

He looked down at the letter she tapped against her hand.  “Sexual assault?” he asked quietly.

“Yes,” she said and then rolled her eyes and added, “but he usually sends the sexual assault letter for Christmas.  For my birthday, it’s usually vicious, torturous murder.”  She watched as Drew looked at the letter and the concern he felt painted lines across his face, red into the corners of his eyes.  “You okay?”

“Yeah, I just,” he said and waved a hand aimlessly.  “I just didn’t know it was your birthday today.  I’d have got you something more than flowers.”

She smiled and kissed him, eyes open.  “I wanted to tell you about this before we moved any further,” she said.  “I’ve had a couple boyfriends since this started, since I picked myself up and wouldn’t be defeated by this punk’s pathetic attempts to rattle my cage.  He’s the one in the cage!  But that doesn’t make it fun or necessarily easy on the man in my life.  The last guy, I didn’t tell him until my birthday arrived and he took it really hard.  I still feel so responsible for putting him through that and don’t want to hurt you that way.”

“Hey, it isn’t you,” Drew said vehemently.  “It’s this prick with the letters.”

“In part,” she said lightly.  “But I have a responsibility.  Like keeping a caged, brain-addled ape: I have to warn visitors.  So, cards on the table: this guy, Jason, is going to keep writing his little fantasies to me every year and I’m going to keep reading them—”

“What?” Drew broke in.  “Why?  If you know how horrible they’re going to be, why read them?”

“Because fuck him!” she said and held Drew’s eye, her smile challenging, determined, and just a little bit flirtatious.  “Because each letter is a battle I always win.  He wants to break me down, defeat me the way he did the first few years, but he can’t.  I’m tougher.  I’m stronger.  But he’s nuts and one of these days, I feel absolutely certain, he’s going to get tired of fantasizing and he’s going to show up.  Try a little live action.  And who knows?” she said and stroked Drew’s hair again.  “I like you a lot, Drew.  A lot.”

“I like you, too,” he murmured unconsciously.

“And if things go well,” she said and paused long enough for an impish grin, “and you’re not afraid of,” she mouthed the word ‘marriage,’ “then it could be that one day, when a—you know—license is signed . . .”

“Marriage doesn’t scare me,” he said, also smiling.  “Not the word, anyway.”

“I’m glad,” she said.  “But if we should be lucky enough to make it that far, it may be what pushes him over the edge.  I just wanted you to know what you’d be getting into.  As if having a relationship with a lab rat wasn’t hard enough.”

“Well, as I work at the same lab,” he said, “and am just as rat-ish, I don’t think that’ll be a problem.  God, you know, I have admired you from afar for the last couple years: to find that all that strength and poise and ability goes all the way to the bone, that you have to live with this constant fear?  I’m so impressed, I don’t know if I’m, I don’t know, worthy.”  She dropped her head and tried to maintain her smile.  He quickly said, “That’s not me trying to back out!  I’m totally in!”

He lifted her lips to his with a finger under her chin.

“You’re sure?” she asked in a small voice.

“What the hell?” he said, trying for a little bravado.  “You can take this punk.”

“Ha, maybe,” she said.  “But it isn’t about winning or even surviving.  If he really wants me dead, I’m dead.  He could rig the house to explode while I’m at the lab; snipe me from the woods across the parking lot at work; or he could shoot an anti-tank rocket at my car on the way home.  You can’t live a good life if you’re afraid of death.  And I’m not.  It’s about living your life and doing what you have to do to stay free and live on your own terms.  My life won’t be stolen before I die.  So last chance, because after tonight I’m going to fall in love with you—and you won’t stand a chance, then,” she said and he tried not to smile but couldn’t hold it back and nodded he thought that was so, “—are you sure you’re in?”

“I’m in.”

 I hope you enjoyed reading this short story.  I also have a few novels published through Amazon’s Kindle Store, the newest being The Parnell Affair.  Thematically, it's not very similar to the above—though it also has a strong female lead character—but hopefully it's a good read, too.  It’s a political thriller about a betrayed spy, a relentless journalist, and the hidden truth behind a President’s demand for war.  Don’t have a Kindle?  No problem: Amazon provides free apps to view all of the great—and inexpensive—Kindle content on your phone, PC, or Mac, here.  Thanks and happy reading!