Bracy Ratcliff

They Lit Up the Night

I’ve been making the trip six days a week for over three years. Monday through Saturday, every day, at 2:30 PM, I walk around the corner to check the mail. Sometimes I have to go back at 3:00 PM because our mailman (mail-person) is not as reliable as that commitment from the Mailman’s Oath would make you think. Ours is deterred by “snow, rain, heat, gloom of night,” and a million other things. The walk is typically a non-event, no one’s home that time of day, there’s never much through traffic, it’s quick enough that weather is not a factor. The mailbox, or the contents do constitute an event for me, akin to opening gifts on Christmas morn when you were a kid. I call it junk mail, as most do, but in my mind, it’s entertainment, the sale papers, coupon books, political flyers, even the bills, the occasional birthday card, holiday greeting cards, a rare magazine—no letters, of course. It’s disappointing that no one mails letters these days—it’s a lost art—the way people used to write letters. Today we get texts with awful spelling and grammar, incomplete thoughts, crazy abbreviations. Anyway, I’m getting off-topic. Earlier this week I was on my way to the mailbox and where I cross the street, right in the middle of the street, there was this shiny black thing about the size of a business card. I couldn’t resist—I picked it up. It was a tiny black book, only about an eighth of an inch thick, maybe ten pages, each scribbled all over, but without a legible thought anywhere, not a single group of letters that made up any real word in any language I knew. There were more numbers than letters, but the numbers didn’t add up to anything cogent either. I decided to check with the neighbor nearest the spot in the road to see if the book was his, but, he said, “Nope, not mine.” So, I took it home with me—better than anything in the mailbox lately.