Prophecy

“What am I supposed to be looking for again—” said my insufferably practical and occasionally cowardly Henry

“Shhh, shut up, watch” I stared into the strip of brass smoothed against our door like I was seconds from winning a staring contest.

This isn’t something I can explain. Just telling him isn’t enough.

He would think I made it up, that I was writing the letters myself and shipping them to my front door so I could spin and jump around like a crazy person. Saying look at me! Look at me!! Nooo, this shit is real. Really fucking real and really fucking happening.

Suddenly, mechanically the mail slot flicks open, and a white blur lazily spits out of it. I look at him with flashed eyebrows and gaping eyes See! Do you see what I have been dealing with for the last 34 hours? I am not crazy. I am not a liar! And here is the proof!

“January…” he said my name with a tentative exhaustion that made my stomach drop “Why don’t we go to bed? I promise we can try this again once you get some rest.” I shrug his touch away with my shoulder and nearly stumble my way towards the door.

I jerk it open without looking. Showing him what I already know. The relatively foreign yet empty street of Hummingbird Lane. A plump attention-seeking moon, our fresh of the doormat isle of Walmart doormat, and our houses twin across the street. No mail truck. No mail carrier, no fucking one. Oh oh! But how did the letter get here you ask? Where did it come from? Great question brain let’s ask the room.

“Maybe they’re running late, dropped the letter off, and then booked it.” he said. I didn’t hear a car, or the shuffles of a panicked mailman running down our manicured walkway. Even if I did surely, we would see them down the road, no one is that fast. Also, “It’s like 2 am…”

“It could have been stuck in the mail slot and a gust of wind pushed it through”

“A gust of wind…pushed…” What? He pinched the bridge between his eyes probably fighting off another flare up and pinched his eyes shut. He wore the stress of losing his job right there, between his eyes.

“God Jan, I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore. Look, I’m going to bed, come, don’t come, I don’t care”

I swiped the letter from the ground and flattened it against his chest. Not hard but just enough to stop him from leaving.

“Would you at least read it, please? I know. I know you think this is another episode. I know you're scared for me, but I promise it is nothing like that. This is weird, something weird is happening. And I’m scared. And I need you.” I beg him with my eyes to hear me. The words coming out of my mouth. Not his mother's. Not my doctors. Mine. I hold the cursed thing between us. He has to be the one to take it. To open it. To swallow its contents like bitter cough medicine that ultimately always makes you better in the end. If he sees me do it he’ll find some way to believe I tampered with it. That I just made an impossibly educated guess. That I was playing a joke on him.

He sighs and kisses my forehead before he gently takes the letter from my hand, already on the move. I don’t ask where he’s going, I just follow.

We move through our own curated maze of cardboard boxes we have both been too ‘caught up’ to unpack. We step over the stack of loose electrical cords, clogging the hallway because my lovely Henry insisted on installing exceptionally complicated sconces into a 60-year-old house himself. Now we’re in the kitchen. The very one I’d rather fight a middle-aged kangaroo than decide on a color scheme for. He tosses the letter on the island next to his car keys (the ones he calls ours) and an overread copy of The 48 Laws of Power and pours himself a drink at his bar cart.

I fidget with my nails pulling at my cuticles until they’re more pieces of something than a piece of something. I can’t say what’s in the letter. I have no idea. They have been different every time, but always really weird shit. The first one came the day we moved in. Henry’s mother finally left her impromptu just to say hello stop-by and I was about to wind down and cry a little in the bathtub when the mail slot twitched open and a letter came through. A fatty cream-like color, thick like the paper I imagine a high school diploma would be.

It was unlabeled. No clear indication of where it came from or even where it’s going. Of course, I was intrigued Of course, I opened it. I sat between two boxes right over there and ripped into that puppy. Even I can admit I’ve been spiraling ever since. But this time it feels right. This feels like the exact situation one is allowed to lose their goddamned mind over.

He sips his drink and drags a kitchen knife along the letter’s seam. Flips it open and takes it in. I watch him carefully, my spine straightens a little as I wait for him to be as freaked out as I am. For him to come to me, apologize for ever doubting me and to promise to help find a solution. Together. One that might even involve us leaving this town, neighborhood, house. Running so far, far away from everyone with a name, and just start over. Maybe.

Instead, I watch him as he reads it a second time then a third and then he finishes his drink in one gulp, places the glass in the stainless steel (guaranteed) sink, and walks toward me. Staring right past me.

“What did it say?” He keeps walking. Right out of the kitchen.

“Henry! What did it say!?” Through the maze of cardboard boxes. I try my best to catch up to him but he’s is moving too fast “…Henry?” He turns abruptly, something tired yet wild in his eyes.

“Honestly you have some nerve. I’m starting to think mom was right. This, this is too much. You are too much. I have—I have to get out of here”

He grabs his jacket (but not his keys?) off some box and rounds the corner of the hallway. My finger twitches and then my foot moves and my limbs band together to do the one thing it’s been doing for years now; I follow after him.

Just in time to watch as he gets caught in an entanglement of wires and falls face-first into decades-old hardwood. A loud, shockingly so, crack silences my shock. Or maybe it’s my hands cupped tightly at my mouth. There was a heartbeat of silence until he started wailing. Whining. Two hands over his nose and blood streaming down his arm. He rocks back and forth saying something like oh my god oh my god oh my god what the fuck my nose oh my god over and over again. I couldn’t help the laugh slipping through my fingers. I laughed like a schoolgirl who was just delivered scathing gossip. He just looked so…I just never seen him…I don't know…hurt?

“Call an ambulance—wait no! Just drive I-I need, How did it– Oh my god” he looks dizzy like really, really dizzy. He slumps against the wall. And it’s like a drum struck in my head. Damn the letter. Damn, the wires. My Henry is hurt!

I turn on my heel sprinting toward my mental image of our car keys and there they are… right next to the letter. For a moment my hand hovers between the two. I’m almost terrified, I think, to know what it knows. To learn whatever upset my Henry. I make a decision swipe the keys and turn. I dont make it far before going back for the letter.

Do not let him leave. I see blood. I see bone. I see obsession. Never be the same again.

-Prophecy.

I see blood. I see bone. My Henry’s whine echoes in the skeleton of our new home. Prophecy

“JANUARYYYYY. PLEASE” I can’t stop shaking.

We were at the hospital for hours. It turns out he landed just perfectly on the edge of flared sconce. His nose wasn’t just broken but shattered.

He didn’t stop crying.

Even when he was drugged, he was crying. Even when he was silent, he was crying. His mom met us there and stared me down while her son was in operation. Just staring. Whenever I approached her, she said some weightless platitude about hardships and some quotes from Psalms but otherwise, she stared at me like I was something stuck on her kitten heel. I wore my cuticles so raw a nurse passing by basically begged me to let her patch them up. That was a month ago.

We–I went through the boxes. We– I went with a lemongrass color scheme in the kitchen…I still haven't been sleeping well.

My Henry, however, is over the moon! All he talks about now is Prophecy.

Who do you think it is? When did it begin? How do we make money off of it? Hey, Jan stand outside and tell me if you see my hand through the slot. Do you see it? What about now?

He hired an electrician to patch up the hallway and made Prophecy his new project. He installed cameras around the house. He dragged a chair to the door and just sits there and watches. He loves it. He never apologized for what he said and I never asked but he is happy I showed him Prophecy. After some trial and error, he realized a couple of things.

It’s a normal functioning mail slot. Just a hole in the door. Now and then it opens, miraculously, by itself and pushes out a letter like a birth with no mother. One time, one really scary time, when he was staring at the door for the entire day. It opened and he snatched at it as if it was the jaw of some beast. The letter comes from somewhere. Something! The mail slot began to fight back, and the door with its hinges began to tremble. Please just let it go. It doesn’t like it…I—I think you’re hurting it. I said. My Henry didn’t care. My Henry hates losing.

Eventually, it snapped at him and as punishment, I think, he took it down. Completly replaced the front door with the first lifeless copy he could find. He dragged the old door with the slot to the guest bedroom. Imagine an empty room, white popcorn walls, 60’s shaggy taupe carpet, one small useless circle window nearly to the ceiling, and a door leaned against the wall in the center of it all. He sits there and asks it questions. Day in and out.

Prophecy has told us–him all sorts of things. Or at least that’s what my Henry says. He doesn’t like it when I read them, so I don’t. The cursed things make me terribly anxious. Sometimes a night I’m scared to even walk past that guest room. At some point, I gave Prophecy a face. I gave him a personality and life. My imagination has made him a terrible creature. Whenever I share my concerns with my Henry he… doesn't take it well. Yesterday he crawled into bed exhausted from his time in the guest bedroom. He looked weathered but seemed like a little boy as he laid his head on my lap

All it takes it one Jan. I just need one letter to tell me what to do next. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Where do I go. What do I say, wear. I’ll do it. Anything. He sounded far away, like he was stuck in his head. Can you say the thing? He asked. And without hesitation, I complied. You’re a good man. I said.

This morning, after complete radio silence, as I moved through the monotony of making him breakfast, he asked me a question.

“Can you watch the door today?’ I asked him why

“I wanted to try something new.” I didn t want to do it but something about the way he looked so beat down made it hard to say no.

There was something off about how we walked up those stairs. My Henry wouldn’t meet my eyes.

I closed the door as silently as possible. The room was exactly as I imagined. Only there were stacks of letters in each corner, letters scattered across the floor. Most of them are blank or printed with only the word Prophecy written across the center. Then there was the door. The sun-bleached cherry red door with a brass handle and brass freckled mail slot. It looked nothing like the creature I created in my head.

I’m not sure. Is the door Prophecy? Or just the mail slot? Or is it something sending the letter from elsewhere?

“Are you there” I all but whispered. I might as well have been talking to myself. I took a step forward, stepping into the ray of light spilling from the lone window. “I want you to leave my husband alone.” silence.

“He is a good man.” Silence. I took a step forward. “He doesn't need your help”

The mail slot twitched open and I froze. A hand slowly pushed a letter through the slot. It held it there, waiting for me. It took me swallowing bile right back down and turning my thoughts completely off to take another step forward. When I took the letter from its hand, it slithered back through the slot and it shuttered closed.

I see a lock. I see a key. I see denial. He is not a good man.

-Prophecy

As if on cue I hear the click of a lock behind me and my heart leaps through my chest. I pull at the door. Screaming his name. Begging him to let me out.

“It wants you Jan. It took me a long time to figure it out, but the letters are for you. It’s not forever, I promise. Just long enough for us to figure it out. Long enough for you to tell me the answer. It’s not forever”

I pull and pull at the door. Screaming until it feels like my lungs are going to collapse but it doesn't matter he is already gone and there is nowhere for me to go.

I sink into a pile of letters, placing my tired eyes ahead of me as if my life depended on it.

The mail slot flicks open. Another letter slips through.