Post-card #83

Dear you, or Belulino,

I used to be a postman, but that’s not why I’m writing. Suffice it to say, one night, I was rambling about my old route, trying to recall the will that came with having official messages to deliver, struggling to sort through the self-nausea of realizing my expertise is outdated. When there was a screech and the smell of scorched rubber got locked up in my nose hairs by the black bag that now choked my neck. My arms became useless because there were much bigger, more useful arms around them, and the tender area of my inner thighs became warm. And this warmth I quickly internalized as a placid acceptance that my life and nausea were no longer in my hands, or stomach. When then there was a voice in the van I found myself suddenly sat in.

It told me there was once a man who woke up to a searing pain like as if his intestines had grown the head of a snake and decided to eat their way out of his body. The man felt that every speck of his not inconsiderable misery was concentrated in his now clogged, writhing intestines. Not soon after he became aware of this agony did a slender and delicate hand reach for his stomach out of the dark, followed by the face and voice of a completely ordinary-looking female stranger, who he noted had her eyes shut tightly. “I found it,” she said to someone who wasn’t evidently there, at a decibel level that made it seem she was speaking with headphones on. “Found what?” the man asked, placing his hand on his stomach too. The woman’s eyes shot open in shock at the alarming realization that she was not touching her own body.

“Who are you talking to, anyway?” asked the man.

She told him she had woken up to a terrible pain in her stomach as if she had eaten glass, and that a voice had told her that if she kept her eyes closed and placed her hand on the spot that hurt, she would be fine.

As soon as the man understood that this strange, ordinary woman had found her pain in his stomach, it was as if he could feel every cell in his body at the same time as they inspired cold oxygen into warm blood: the snake was gone at once, and the woman, who was no longer ordinary but irretrievably beautiful––she was gone too.

The man, now finished with his story, apologized for having abducted me in such a dramatic way. Taking the bag off my head, he explained he could spare no effort. And that is how I became a postman again, stalking about the strangers of the world, delivering the man’s words in hope that, eventually, they will find the woman whose mouth they came from. I wonder, how does your stomach feel?

Yours,

Django Fontina