Kind of a quirky, weird story.

Rhonda ambled up the dirt road to the mailboxes on the warmest April day she’d ever seen. The dusty light brown fields had just been tilled and not a drop of moisture turned up as the disc plowed under the topsoil.

She reached for the faded red flag on the mailbox and pulled it up to alert the letter carrier to its presence. Since the rash of thefts from mailboxes, Bet didn’t like her mailing from the box, but it was too hot to walk all the way into town. Besides she hadn’t enclosed a check in the envelope and if someone did steal her story, maybe it would change his life. She stood there imagining the mailbox thief reading her manuscript.

She pictured him hunched over the pages, reading her horrific tale, his eyes melting from the intensity of ghoul and dastardly deed. She laughed with glee, “There! That’ll teach him to read other people’s mail!”

The sudden chill as a bead of sweat trickled down her back brought her quickly back to her senses. She gulped in the dusty air as she tried to capture her feeling of satisfaction at seeing the thief deteriorate into a gooey mass. She grasped for the words to describe the colors all running together. “Ah, I know –twin spumoni ice cream rivers flowed from his eye sockets burning the skin on his face as it dripped down, leaving a puddle on his shirt front.”

She pulled a pen from behind her ear and scribbled quickly on the back of the crumpled grocery-shopping list from her apron pocket. Re-energized, Rhonda quickly strode across the fields up to the house. She snatched at the last of the tulips drooping in the front porch planter box. She found a milk glass pitcher for the flowers and set it in the middle of the farmhouse table.

She whistled brightly as she swept and vacuumed, then waved cheerily to her neighbor Paulina, as the two women hung wash out to dry on the lines. At least it would dry quickly in this heat. She pushed her damp hair back behind her ear and off her face.. It was definitely time for a glass of sweet tea on the breezy verandah. Rhonda toed the porch swing back and forth lazily while sipping the icy nectar from her glass.

Just as the afternoon began to cool off, she turned her thoughts to fixing dinner. “What would Bert like tonight?” she mused. Reaching into the deep freeze, she came up with a bag of fryer parts she’d put up last fall after the butchering.

The screen door rattled as Bert banged through and dropped his brief case on the counter. The aroma of chicken frying in hot oil tickled his nose. Rhonda looked over at him and smiled knowing she’d scored a point. “Here,” she handed him a bowl of mashed potatoes and one of green beans, “the biscuits and gravy are already on the table. Why don’t you set these out on your way to wash up? Oh, by the way, I have a treat for dessert. How about a little spumoni?”

© 2001/2003  Sue Barton