49

In the morning Doug awoke to see outside his window a winter wonderland. The sight was beautiful. It had snowed during the night, and ground and porch, trees and bushes were all completely covered with pure glorious white.

Only…

Only the air was warm and humid, the sky cloudless, and the ivory blanket that covered the world outside seemed smoothly even, strangely symmetrical.

He opened the back door and looked down.

The ground was not covered with snow.

The ground was covered with envelopes.

He stood there stunned. The envelopes had been placed, facedown, end-to-end over everything, their flat edges fitting perfectly against the side of the house in a straight line and continuing over the back porch, over the storage shed, over the manzanita bushes and the trees. The enormity of such an effort was overwhelming, and the fact that it had been completed in one night, directly outside his house while he had been sleeping undisturbed inside, was terrifying.

He was glad that Trish had spent the night at the hospital with Billy. He would not have wanted her to see this.

Gingerly, Doug bent down and picked up the envelope nearest the door, turning it over. It was addressed to him from his mother. He picked up the one next to it, addressed to him from his father. The one next to that was from his Aunt Lorraine.

He had the feeling that the mailman had grouped the envelopes in a specific order and that, if he made the effort to trace the pattern, he would find that the lineage of his life spread outward from that point in the return addresses of the letters.

Doug stood up. He’d thought at first that the whole town had been covered by mail, but he saw almost instantly that past the white blanket covering his own trees was the natural green of real nature. He slipped on his sandals and stepped onto the back porch. The paper crinkled beneath his feet, but he continued forward, determined to see how far the mailman had gone. When he came to the first bush, its leafy shape entirely hidden by the back-to-back envelopes that domed its true form, he extended a cautious hand, curious to see how the envelopes had been attached together.

The dome collapsed.

A house of cards. The mailman had used the envelopes to construct a house of cards, balancing them one on top of the other with no adhesive until they covered the bush.

He walked across the white ground to the first tree, touching it.

The tree covering, too, collapsed in a rain of letters.

In the house the phone rang, its jangling loud in the early-morning stillness. He knew it was probably Trish calling, but he still hurried forward through the bushes and trees, away from the house, starting off letter landslides as he ran. He had to see how far this extended.