of branches and fire extinguishers

Ruth taps a sticker onto the top of a brown box, one practically identical to the thousands she's stickered before and completely unassuming.

It's important work, work that keeps a whole country moving. Grandmas sending strange trinkets to grandkids a thousand miles away, letters sent by dramatic lovers, the occasional small business owner pretending they aren't selling those candles they're shipping to avoid paying extra. 

Ruth has seen all kinds of people ship all kinds of things in her forty-some-odd years at her sleepy little post office. She’s gone through ten different itterations of her uniform. Things rarely surprise her these days, even when she's stuck working late like today, after midnight, and making sure the packages are all ready for shipment by five am sharp.

The box, once dull and blessedly ordinary, explodes.

Light blinds the woman, the force pushing her back from her counter and stumbling. She doesn't fall over, strong legs bracing and a hand grabbing blindly for a nearby shelf to steady herself.

Ruth sputters and coughs, wiping at her thick square glasses and blinking away a rainbow of light from her eyes. The box had burst into green-blue fire and all that was left on her linoleum counter is its cardboard remains and a completely unharmed wooden stick.

"What?" Ruth asks the air, incredulously. She doesn't know where to direct her confusion. What is that stick? Why did that just explode? Who wanted that damn thing to be shipped and why hadn't it been marked as delicate? 

The wooden stick doesn't answer, and the smoke from the fire sets off the sprinklers. 

Ruth curses the cold water that starts drenching her, glad that all the rest of the packages are already back in the storeroom, and cups a palm above her glasses so she can see. The fire still flickers, unbothered by the sudden downpour and Ruth goes for the fire extinguisher a few steps to her left. 

Wrenching the fire extinguisher from its holder with slippery hands Ruth aims the nozzle at the counter, letting loose a stream of foam. 

Of course this would happen a month off from her retirement. Her wife had told her to use the rest of her long-saved PTO, said they could move the Italy trip up and forget all their working woes. 

Ruth can hear her saying "I told you so!" ringing in her ears as she squints and blinks through the water, watching the light of the fire finally get doused by the foam of the extinguisher. The "I told you so!" would come far after her wife makes sure she's hale and hearty after dealing with a package bomb, of course, but it would come. 

Stepping carefully forward with her extinguisher still brandished Ruth eyeballs the stick half covered in foam. It looks completely innocent, the kind of stick you'd use to play fetch with a dog or step on in the woods. 

"You won't be ruining my retirement, you dead bit of shrubbery," Ruth says threateningly. "Set anything else on fire and I'll bury you in foam!"

The stick does not reply. 

They stay at an impasse as the sprinklers shut off, the post office dead silent and interrupted only by the sound of dripping. 

Something stupid takes over Ruth's body, then, some kind of energy that's ill-thought-out and not entirely her own. 

She drops the fire extinguisher to her side, the metal tapping and bouncing. With careful, callused fingers Ruth reaches outward through the soft white foam, and she grabs the polished stick. 

Her vision is rewashed in light, something powerful and strange and glorious running from her hands to her feet. For a moment she cups the world in her hands, she can smell the earth beneath her covered by layers of concrete and tile, and hear wind rustling through the trees. 

Ruth is alive and everything around her is alive. The bugs and the birds and the trees singing. She can see her mother, her mother's mother, and thousands who came before her.

And then it's gone. 

With a numb, tingling hand Ruth sets the stick back down onto the counter. Carefully. Gently. 

She reaches up and wipes her eyes, not sure if the wetness there is all from the sprinklers, and stares at the stick. 

"What are you?" Ruth asks it weakly. She feels insurmountably small, like her body is too little for what was shown to her. Like she is only a tiny piece in a huge tapestry. 

The stick doesn't respond. 

This, whatever it is, she needs to keep it safe. Ruth needs to keep whatever is in that branch away from…

She isn't sure of what, exactly. But she will be. 

Ruth picks up the stick again and tucks it carefully into the waistband of her shorts, before tucking her polo in over it. Outside sirens are blaring, and she can see red washing over the landscape outside the window. The fire department. 

She tells them a story close enough to the truth, and the police appear with dogs to sniff at the foam and box left on the counter. It's a huge event in a little town like Ruth's. Old postwoman almost gets blown up by a package bomb and they don't even know who did it? The scandal! 

Ruth puts in the rest of her PTO the next day, and her manager can't do a thing to stop her. Retirement comes early and Ruth's wife keeps checking on her like she doesn't expect her to be there still, every time relieved that she is. 

"Amelia," Ruth says, two days before their flight to Italy. They're both in their little living room, settled on their beat-up couch that's old enough to be a college student. 

"Yes, Ruth?" Amelia says, turning from her tablet where she’s looking through travel guides. 

"That night at the post office," Ruth starts, stuntedly. "I know what blew up the package."

Amelia sets aside her tablet quickly, giving her wife all her attention.

"You have to swear not to tell a soul, 'Melia, I have a terrible feeling it's something much bigger than the two of us," Ruth says, taking Amelia's hand. 

They end up canceling the trip to Italy. The stick is very insistent they go to Greece instead, and Amelia handles getting them on a flight to Athens. Even retired, Ruth must make one last delivery. Probably the strangest one of her life.