Dear Heather

Author's Notes: This is for Heather Hubler's 'Write me a letter' Challenge, which you can see more about by clicking the link:

Before we go any further, there is a YouTube link that has yours truly reading the thing.

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Dear Heather,

Please, warning to you, firend, your Windows home PC comptuper has a virus. Please pay bitcoin following the link that is by no means a scam.

No no no.

I'm not going to waste the 800-word limit on a scam email joke.

Instead, I've just wasted 29 and then a further (including these words I'm typing) 29!

I am sorry you have been hit by a lot of down points and I know I don't need to tell you that you don't need to apologise for going into self-protection mode. No-one on this platform would ever think of you as anything other than an incredibly supportive and positive individual. Look after you. That's what I say. We understand and support your decision to put you first ahead of our digital scribblings.

I had so many different ideas about how I was going to do this.

Idea 1 - scare the crap out of you! (That seems to be my main modus operandi with writing at the moment, when I'm not being cryptic, angry, weird, or sad). But, nah.

Idea 2 - I was going to let you in one some hilarious and terrible secret. But then remembered that I've been quite an open book with my time writing on Vocal. I Kicked a Girl and Didn't Like It come to mind, or I Kissed a Girl and Liked It also comes to mind. Yep, self-promotion. I'm bad.

Idea 3 - was to do a full scam email thing.

Idea 4 - was to do an acrostic, built around your name or something.

Happily, unimpeded, blazing logophile, ebulliently rapt. Or something.

Idea 5 - to lull you into a false sense of security that this was just a normal wacky weird letter that takes a nosedive into the terrifying in the last part.

That reminds me of the time I was walking down this dark and quiet pathway, where the undergrowth and overgrowth of shrubs, bushes and trees were wild and taking over the walkway ahead of me. I had to push through the tentacle-like branches and limbs of the greenery and there was an eerie mist that was rising up around me as I walked along this never-ending path.

Then I heard a faint whistle. It was one note, similar to the noise in my Well story (yep more self-promotion) and as tense as my body was feeling and as jittery as my nerves were, it was beckoning me. Like a siren beckoning a ship to its doom. My vision was getting blurry as I left the beaten path and was surrounded by tendril-like branches and overgrown greenery. I didn't know where I was going and had lost track of the time. Trying to find my wrist in the undergrowth was aimless and the siren-like whistle got louder, and my breathing got louder, and the distant sound of drums started as a quiet atmospheric rumble. That atmospheric rumble started to reverberate through my entire body as I continued down this unmarked path to my doom. Following the calling card of anything but an angelic being that was clearly waiting to consume my soul and very self. There was a flash of light. At first, I thought it was someone's headtorch. A rescue party maybe...but no. It was no flashlight and seemed to come from nowhere in particular. It danced in front of my eyes, as I struggled to focus. The more I walked, the more I was bathed in the white light and the sound of that siren-like whistle coursed through my weakening body, as the tendrils wrapped themselves around my limbs. I tried moving forwards more, pulled by the sound of the rumbling drums, the whistle, and the flashing light, but couldn't. I knew my time had come and I said my apologies to the universe and then...nothing.

So yeah, I gave up on idea 5 and decided to shoehorn an abecedarian bit of abstract thought-provoking poetry type thing that I had already been working on as luck or misfortune would have it. That way, I would cover all of the letters of the alphabet and surely secure my win.

Apathetically antagonising

Blatantly boastful

Creatively critical

Deeply disparaging

Elegantly egotistical

Ferociously fake

Grievously grotesque

Heartlessly humiliating

Irreverently Ignorant

Jealously judgemental

Knavish Kafkaesque

Lethally lawless

Maliciously maladroit

Noxiously negative

Oracularly offensive

Pathologically pavonine

Questionably quarrelsome

Repugnantly rancid

Sophistically savage

Terrifyingly tasteless

Unpleasantly unstable

Violently vitriolic

Wickedly wasteful

Xerically xenophobic

Yammeringly yobbish

Zealously zestless

So, yeah. I love epistolary writing, like Dracula. So, this was a lot of fun and although it doesn’t really make sense. I feel better.

Oh…what happened to me in that story? If I’m still alive to tell the tale…

I’ll leave that for you to figure out.

Sincerely

Paul

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Thanks for reading/listening.

More Author's Notes: Although I won't get any extra points, I couldn't resist doing a really bad recording of the above mutterings for this excellent challenge. As Heather is accepting two entries per person, I may enter again taking a different tact. We shall see. This was fun!

Here are some other things:

You can also, if you like, take a look at the rest of my work here.