The Adventures of Brian, the Confused Mail Clerk

The number seventeen made him sad. Not boo-hoo sad; the kind of wistful sadness felt somewhere in the rib cage, a few inches above the duodenum, that makes one stare hard at the horizon and wonder what used to be what was never seen. Brian was a rather bland-looking male of non-specific heritage on the cusp of entering middle age. Yes, Brian was no longer a young, fresh-faced university graduate on the second floor of a minor metropolitan processing center. Now it was nearly two decades later, and he was on the third floor handling high-priority correspondence for the American Midwest, half an hour from his home in Spokane, South Dakota.

Now that his job had mercifully settled down, he made a comfortable living. A little dull, sure, but after all that malarkey some seventeen years ago (sigh), dull was as welcome as bachelorhood after a dealer for a girlfriend. Back on topic, Brian's tasks tended to involve logging high-security mail in the depot's private server, or the occasional account management for the P.O. boxes on the ground floor. Actually, it was mostly office busy work, filing code-numbered reports and attending meetings in his supervisor's stead when she had found some excuse to flee the doldrums of pointless bureaucracy. He wasn't the type to spend his afternoons playing video games on his computer like some of the other workers. This helped him close the gap to a five-digit salary (but let's keep the general public believing it's four).

It was a typical Monday morning. The droning of phones, typing, laser jet copier whirs and beeps, and the odd honk of a horn from the traffic outside was enough to make a brain spontaneously bleed from boredom. That was when the envelope arrived. It was tucked in between some report forms in his "In" box, and he hadn't noticed it really until it was the topmost item on his docket. It was a curious envelope. There were no addresses printed on it; just the words, "To Whom it May Concern", and two stamps: A fifteen-cent "Young Elvis" commemorative stamp, and a thirty-cent "Fat Elvis" stamp. This wasn't the dead letter office. Shouldn't this have gone to the basement? In this case, a trusted member of the postal service (a position he had qualified for and attained), could very well, without judgment, check the contents of the letter to determine its sender or intended recipient. Or he could forget about it and send it on down to the D.L.O. And did the envelope feel a little heavier than expected?