Submitted to: Contest #321

Friday Afternoon

Written in response to: "Write a story that has a big twist."

Contemporary Fiction

The assault of summer is slain with a slice as the metal-rimmed glass door latches shut. The dry coolness of the post office’s interior mingles with Marianne’s bare arms to convince her skin that it has never and will never feel anything but this temperature—this mundane cold, cocky enough to raise hairs but with a voice too frail to call for a jacket. The entrance room is void of life, home only to the buzz of the air conditioner and the distant traffic muffled by glass. Marianne’s shoes tap along the stale tile floor, reverberating throughout the emptiness and echoing with a tinge from the walls painted by the metal doors of seldom-opened PO boxes.

She slows to a stop on her approach of the next door and looks through its glass with shivering eyes and a fidgeting jaw. Her hands rest limply over the scuffed push bar as she focuses without precision on the three figures within: The gray-haired hunchback woman with the spirit of a rusted dagger fills out a form on the side desk—her reading glasses connect to her curly hair with two small dangling chains on each limb…. The equally-ancient man that leans on the main counter with a face strained in confused constipation as the young man across the counter hollers repetitions to him from two feet away…. The young man—the clerk…. They move like a dream. Their voices, the woman’s scratching pen, the dry gurgles of clearing throats, and occasional, “HUH?!” from the old man… deadened murmurs radiating from the glass of the door to Marianne’s ears like a foreign language to a drowning drunk. She inhales a deep breath from her chest; the moving air dances anxiously with the pounding of her heart—the beating lump of love and life, pounding her brain with vibrations, and bursting hot blood through her veins in rhythmic explosions that make her skin shiver with each thundering jolt. Beating… beating… her hands turn sweaty. She exhales and opens the door.

The dream—the stage—welcomes her merge with ticklish anticipation, but the actors (on the other hand) wake to her presence with bewilderment and brace. Marianne fights her drained energy and shaky spirit to conjure what feels like a smile—toothless, but friendly. Her eyes, yearning too loudly for a blanket, fail to catch the memo and remain, to the outside, as morose- and annoyed-looking as ever. Despite this, the effort proves good enough to ward off the crusty glare of the woman at the desk who shuffles in a stiff rotation back to her work. The elderly man squints towards Marianne’s shape with his jaw tense and open, then he, too, returns to normalcy. The young clerk in front of him, only two years older than Marianne, does nothing more than momentarily shift his eyes before snapping them back to the man in front. Marianne gets in line.

The floor is carpeted in this room but only up to the counter. The space beyond where the young man works is covered in the same small white tiles as the entrance, the ones with the speckles of dully-colored dots that make the squares always look clean and always look dirty—chipped and scuffed, made of ceramic that chills through the soles of shoes straight to the bone, no matter the weather. Marianne looks up from the floor; her gaze saunters naturally to the clerk… there are so few people in her town, so few in her age group, and even fewer that she finds attractive. The clerk’s eyes leap to hers which makes her own instantly flee to the wall—it doesn’t matter where. The clerk returns his attention to the old man (“HUH?!” the man booms).

Marianne quickly grows bored of looking at the wall and its posters. Her gaze lowers first to a standing lean, then to a crouch, then back to the floor. Her eyes stay low while her perception rolls its chair to the steady music of the clerk’s voice that flows through her ears. His tired voice grabs her sense of ease and homeliness and rolls with them down a wintry hill where they build up like a snow ball, larger and larger until their mass become too big to contain. She looks back up to him and allows herself to admire his face, falling into a meditative trance and forgetting who or what she is. It warms her, not like the blazing heat outside, but like that of a hug. His eyes bounce to hers; a lighting bolt strikes her spine and forces her to look away… then she looks back.

He sees her. She sees him…. His tired lips stretch and their corners raise; Marianne’s then do the same, but by the time she realizes it,her smile is dissolved and her eyes have fallen once more. He follows her lead and returns his focus to the old man.

The cold air becomes drier. She blinks then closes her eyes to keep their delicate skin from cracking. She holds them closed as best as she can, but a voice stronger than her will shakes them open: the grating whisper of the old woman at her side, “Talk to him, honey,” she says, raising her wrinkled, bony fingers and patting them like the landing of a fly against Marianne’s arm. “He’s a nice boy.” She snickers sickly then shuffles away—out the door, then the other door, and into the heat. Impermanence…. The world feels smaller without her in it.

Marianne barely gets a chance to adjust to the change before the next domino falls. The man in front waddles one step at a time in a 180 degree turn, then one step at a time to the first door, then to the next door, and finally into the heat. The exterior door closes slowly inch by inch until it latches with a stifled click that permeates through the interior door. Marianne looks back to the counter to the only other soul in the building.

The clerk shuffles a few sheets of paper around, pretending to read, pretending not to notice her. The resolve of time drains to impatience and urges Marianne to step forward. She does. The young man does not look up. She looks to his papers on the counter and lets her eyes settle on top of them like retirees on a porch swing.

Silence…

A few seconds of eternity is then shaken awake back to the present among the hum of the air conditioner and the ‘shhh’, ‘shhh’, shuffling of the clerk’s papers, interrupted by the delicate but shaky voice of Marianne:

“Hello.”

“Hello,” he echoes, not looking up to her avoiding watch.

Silence ensues once again until it boils over.

“How are you?” Marianne asks with a long stick.

“Fine. How are you?”

“Good.”

“…”

“…”

“I need to submit a change of address… and to, um… to forward my mail…”

The clerk nods and pivots away, disappearing from view, then reappearing with a sheet of paper. He does not look up; neither does she.

He pulls out a pen from a nearby cup, scribbles it on a separate page, clicks it closed and sets it aside, then he grabs a new pen from the cup and tries again. This one works. He fills out a few lines, retracing over letters where the ink skipped… Marianne’s chest expands, holds, then shrinks with a stream of surreptitious air that flows from her nostrils like a final breath.

“Okay…” the clerk mumbles to the paper. “And what’s the new address?”

Her tongue leans against the inside of her dried lips then retreats. “Um…” she clears her throat quieter than a mouse’s cough, then continues in a perked whisper, “It’s 493… Southland Drive….” She watches him write—his pen dances over the paper with the grace of an ice skater on gravel.

“Southland, is that one word?”

“Mhm, yes.”

“Okay…”

“And that’s, um… that’s in Atlanta.”

Through her peripheral vision, she sees his head fly up and his wide eyes shoot towards her, then he quickly returns to the paper with forced nonchalance. Marianne sniffles and scratches a spot on her face that doesn’t itch.

In a steady voice, he mutters, “The city, huh?”

“Mhm…”

He nods his head. “So ‘493 Southland Drive’, and that’s in Atlanta…. The zip code is…?”

“Oh, sorry. It’s: Three zero, three one eight.”

“...Okay.” His pen scratches in smooth curves and sharp lines. “So I’ll, um… I’ll submit this for you, and, uh…” he lifts his head up to hers, “and it should be set in a day or two.”

She nods without raising her head. “...Great, thank you.”

“…”

“…”

Marianne sniffles and nods to herself again before turning with the elegance of a squeaky wheel towards the first door. She checks her pockets for her keys and takes a—

“Marianne, wait.”

Her heart freezes, her skin tightens. She looks over her shoulder first, then the rest of her body lags to catch up. The clerk, his skin flushing red, leans his forearms on the counter. He takes a slow warm breath that wiggles out with a trill, then he looks to her... to her eyes... then into them. She doesn’t fight it.

“Marianne, we… we had some fun together—over the years…. We had some good times.”

Her lips suck inwards into a pout. She looks away to a space between the counter’s top and the floor then squints to fight off the icy tickle of the dry air.

He continues, “I know we had some rougher patches, but… but we had some good times in there, too…. So thank you for those. I’ll always have them...” His voice softens. “I’ll always cherish them…”

Marianne looks to the baseboards of the room. Her pupils hop along their rail like children playing in a summer’s rain.

The air conditioner hums as it always has... the air feels cool and dry, just as it always has….

Her mouth opens with an inhale then freezes. She looks over her shoulder through the invading deluge of sound—crackling tires force its presence through the layers of glass. She watches but cannot see it. She waits and stares while the rumble of the car’s engine groans and moans, then dies with the impetus of a gunshot to its head. The droning of the air conditioner flows steady, just as it always has. The air as dry as ever...

The wall clock’s secondhand ticks. She finishes her turn towards the door then her voice cracks, “Have a good day.”

With a blink she finds her body detached from thought and now with its hands on the inner bar of the exterior door. The pads of her cold clammy fingers slide off of the bar with the collapse of her arms and the drop of her head. She feels herself slip—watching it from the rows of red-cushioned seats from the theater within her head—falling farther and farther, but then, like a shock from a defibrillator, she’s awoken again: the muggy kiss of the orange air rushes over her, trailed by a wave of sound so clear that its edges cut her ears. She looks up. A middle-aged woman with a small-town smile holds the door open and nods.

The opening radiates like a fire during winter, warming her front with a blaze while her back shivers from the cold behind. Marianne smiles back to the woman; her ‘thanks’ travels through the cracked bed of a starved river as she skips out past her into the drenching fervor of the summer air. It’s so intense, so unrelenting, so new. Her skin cries; she walks on.

END

Posted Sep 19, 2025
Share:

You must sign up or log in to submit a comment.

2 likes 0 comments

Reedsy | Default — Editors with Marker | 2024-05

Bring your publishing dreams to life

The world's best editors, designers, and marketers are on Reedsy. Come meet them.