Ashveil Hollow Post Office

In the heart of town stands the post office— small, brick, unassuming, the kind of building you’d walk past a thousand times without once looking up. Someone has always kept it.

Some say when they enter it feels— off—putting, to state mildly. Some say that it has a certain smell that reminds them of a morgue. Either way, not many will care to venture in further than the front desk to send a package or talk to the lonely mail clerk, Fredrick.

The postmaster is inside, has always been inside, and yet has never, not once, belonged to the town around it. No one asks why anymore. No one lives remembering where they came from, or who they were before they were only this— a shape behind frosted glass. A shadow crossing the doorway of the back room, sorting what hasn’t happened yet.

No one remembers the Postmaster aging. No one remembers them changing. There is no history in the Hollow Archives, and Gideon Pike— the town Archivist has no clue, and it vexes him dearly, because there is only present tense. The Postmaster is just a scratch of a pen, the wax pressed warm beneath a seal, and a signature at the bottom of every single letter that goes out into the Hollow.

The trouble started— when a letter addressed to Mrs. Aldous Fenn.

It arrived on a Tuesday. Condolences, the kind sent after a death, the kind of letter you fold once and keep in a drawer that you don’t open. Except the intended condolences were towards her husband— Aldous Fenn was indeed very much alive that Tuesday. He was alive again on Wednesday too, mending a fence, complaining about the frost that was starting. Then he died on Thursday, in his sleep, of nothing anyone or the coroner could name.

This wife, though, was already wearing black.

Lately, some residents have started to refuse their letters.

Leaving them on the porch to curl and yellow in the weather. They mark them return to sender in shaking handwriting, though there is no sender to return them to— only the Postmaster, who never takes them back. So they pile up on the counter.

It is, by every account, a foolish thing to do.

How else would you prepare for the flood if you don’t know it to happen?

That might be the cruelty of it, and the town has stopped pretending otherwise. The letters do not cause what they describe. They only tell you what is to come. Refuse the letter, and the thing still comes— you simply have chosen to meet it unprepared, unwarned, undressed for the weather of your own life.

And so the town keeps writing back. Keeps signing for what it does not understand. Keeps the small brick building at its heart open, lit, waiting— because the alternative, everyone has agreed, is worse.

No one has ever seen the Postmaster’s face clearly enough to describe it. Ask three residents, and you’ll get three different answers, none of which agree, none of which sound quite like a person.

Somewhere in the back room, right now, there is a letter with your name on it.

It has already been postdated and marked for sending.

You just haven’t opened it yet.