The Wanderlustrous Misencounter of Milos Verde

Milos Verde liked his job, but wasn’t fond of the uniform shorts, which kept ridding up his backside. He was tall and slim – much slimmer than he’d been in high school – with a mess of brown tresses that fell over his eyes, giving him the effect of a sheep dog. He was in his mid-twenties and had little ado about his youth, as he’d been working so long that he had begun to feel a certain uninvited blanket of monotony fall across his existence and wished to escape his small town of Connecticut.

But today, his life was about to be interrupted by something ordinarily extraordinary.

Milos parked his mail truck at the corner of Vine and Cherry Blossom Street, turned off the talk radio story about exotic bird species escaping from a nearby zoo, and slid out of his seat and onto the sizzling pavement. It was July, and the streets were quiet. Milos grabbed his messenger bag and meandered off to the first mailbox, making his rounds easily about the block until he got to the last house, the Mosier residence, with their tiny black French bulldog that always greeted him with a frantic dance and a high-pitched bark from behind the red bolted door.

"Hang on!" He thought.

There was a package at the bottom of the bag, not addressed to the Mosiers. Had he forgotten to include it in the post delivery of another house?

Milos reached in and pulled out the package, which was handsomely wrapped in light brown paper, kitchen twine, and adorned with some kind of leaf. It was heavy for its size – about 6 x 4 – and had something romantic about it. Milos turned the package over to find no name, but an address neatly printed on the side with a note to the postman.

“4218 Cherry Blossom Street. Sign for Delivery.”

Milos doubled back around the street, away from his truck and scoped out the house which actually had a cherry blossom tree in its front yard. It was the Thai residence.

Milos walked up to the front door, rang the bell, and waited for an answer.

He thought about the last time he’d seen Mr. or Mrs. Thai, and suddenly his hands started to sweat, and the package started to slip. A few weeks ago, during a particularly gray day, Milos had seen Mrs. Thai run across the lawn after getting caught in a little more than a light drizzle as she was gardening. While he had been been making deliveries several doors down, he hadn't missed that she was not wearing a bra underneath her white, satin blouse. Milos smiled and blushed a little at the thought.

He rang the bell again and leaned in close to the door. No answer.

Milos checked his watch and sighed. Then began to leave a note saying that they’d missed a signed delivery. But just as Milos started to walk towards the sidewalk, he heard music playing. “Was it classical?” he thought. “Or maybe jazz?”

Milos didn’t know much about music. He wondered if it was too loud to hear the doorbell, then quickly realized that it wasn’t coming from inside. Milos peaked around the perky rose bushes and swallowed his nerves. Then slowly, he walked towards the back of the house along the neatly trimmed blue Kentucky grass, the music growing louder as he approached.

“Hello!” he called out. “Sign for a package. Mr. Thai, Mrs. Thai…”

As Milos rounded the corner, he froze stiff.

It was a jungle. Not just that it was beautiful and full of exotic yard plants or flowing water – although, indeed, it was – but the backyard was an actual jungle, starting at a wild wall of banana trees and reaching into a deep abyss of flora and fauna not at all native to Connecticut.

Milos wondered if he’d walked too far beyond the backyard and into the wooded parcel of land between Cherry Blossom and Oak Street. He turned back toward the street behind him and saw the hot, quiet neighborhood just as it had been moments before.

Then there was a scream. Milos’s eyes went wide as he whipped around to the jungle before him.

“Mrs. Thai?” yelled Milos as he rushed into the bush.

Milos catapulted through a rush of leaves and colourful, fluttering birds, until he heard the scream again, from another direction this time. He burst into a jog until he stepped on a pink, slimy fruit and SPLASH. Milos was instantly submerged under the weight of water. He floundered, grabbing hold of his bag, and broke the surface of what turned out to be a mossy lake. He fumbled towards the edge of the lake, where he pulled himself up by clinging onto a thorny vine.

As he spat out water and caught his breath, a large, dark man with pointed shoes and a turban came towards Milos and handed him a towel.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” said the man in a low, melodic voice.

Milos sat, stunned, and pointed to himself, as if to say, “me?”

The man reached down toward Milos, sending Milos flinching, awaiting a blow to the head. But when no blow came, Milos slowly opened his eyes to find that the man had been reaching for the package, which Milos dropped on his way into the water.

“Hey…” stuttered Milos. “Hey, you’ve gotta sign for that.”

Then there was that scream again. This time it was right behind him.

“Mrs. Thai!” questioned Milos.

Milos swiveled around and saw her just beyond the lake. Sitting in a chaise lounge with her legs crossed, long, black hair tied into a bun, wide almond eyes, in a white and black, silk kimono – and only a kimono – was Mrs. Thai – not screaming, but laughing – shrieking with laughter.

“What was so funny as to scream bloody murder?” though Milos, slightly irritated.

Opposite of Mrs. Thai was another woman in a white, linen suit – someone familiar. Milos racked his brain as he tried to place her face. He’d seen her before. Perhaps in a coffee shop or at the library.

Between the two women was a record player spinning Joao Gilberto’s and Stan Getz’s Corcovado.

Milos mustered up whatever gumption he had in his soul, grabbed the package boldly out of the large man’s hands and walked over awkwardly, if not with some hint of swagger, towards Mrs. Thai and her companion.

Milos cleared his throat. “Good morning, Mrs. Thai. Won’t you please sign for this package?”

Mrs. Thai looked at Milos with indifference, which instantly melted into devilish intrigue.

“You aren’t our normal postboy, are you?” She jested.

Milos felt her words like a knife. He wasn’t a boy. And he had been working the same route for two years as of last Tuesday. How could she not know who he was?

Milos collected his confidence and placed it back into the recesses of his being. He parted his lips in annoyance. He took out a stylus pen from his shirt pocket, his recently submerged signature screen from his bag – which was now blinking white and glitched flashes of purple and green – and held it out towards the stunning and offensive creature of a woman.

She signed the glitching screen as Milos placed the package at the foot of Mrs. Thai’s chair.

Mrs. Thai quickly picked up the package and shook it, turning to her friend and smiling, just as Milos took a step towards what he thought was the direction he’d come from.

“What’s your name, young man?” asked Mrs. Thai’s companion.

“Milos,” he said, turning to make her acquaintance.

She reached out her hand and he met it.

“I’m Oprah! But you probably already knew that.” she said with a wink.

Milos almost slapped himself for not placing her face. It was Oprah. The. Oprah. The woman that inspired him to join his mother’s book club and loose 50 pounds after high school.

Milos blacked out for a few seconds and said something which he hoped was a compliment or at the very least an appropriate greeting.

Mrs. Thai told Milos to call her Susan and asked the large man with the songful voice to pour another crystal glass of highball for “her new friend.”

“Would you like to join us for a drink, Milos?” She asked, invitingly, as she sat up and moved over to make room for Milos to sit on her chair.

Milos sat and the three of them drank themselves tipsy and silly, until Susan invited him for a soak in the lake, as she shed her single piece of clothing and plunged in.

Milos did not hesitate to accept her offer, and they swam and floated in the increasingly steaming body of water full of suckling koi fish until the sun dipped behind the trees and Milos suddenly remembered that he hadn’t yet finished his post route.

Milos looked around the jungle as the spirits wore of and noticed that Oprah had taken her leave and the large man that had offered him a towel was nowhere to be seen.

Susan leaned in close to Milos and he forgot about how much he liked his job. Then she kissed him softly, then not so softly, until they embraced in a much-too-passionate enlacement of limbs and wet hair, eyes shut.

As Milos threw his caution and his postal duties to the wind, a giant, bright floodlight turned on and Milos opened his eyes.

He was instantly dazed.

Susan was gone. He sat in what was now a cool, chlorinated swimming pool, alone. He looked about him and saw no jungle. No banana trees or colorful birds or strange fruit or thorny vines littering the ground. It was all a quiet, flat blue-green expanse of perfectly maintain grass and rose bushes.

Milos dozily climbed his way out of the pool and over the where the chaise lounges had been, and where now two plastic deck chairs sat. But the package was nowhere to be seen. He reached into his messenger bag and found that his signature screen was completely nonfunctional.

Milos, completely puzzled, checked his pulse. Normal.

He sat for a while, until the evening grew cold. How was he going to explain this to the postmaster back at the office?

Milos collected his damp clothes and trudged his way towards the front yard and on towards his mail truck, hoping that he had been mugged and the package stolen…or better yet, drugged.

Milos discontently finished his post route and drove back to the office just as it was closing, the postmaster saying “We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” in a very serious tone.

Milos clocked out, hung up his truck key, and went to his locker to change into his normal clothes. As he walked out of the post office, he heard something slip into the mail slot – a late package.

“It’ll have to wait til morning,” thought Milos. But, still, he reached into the mailbox and grabbed a small, café-tinted, twine-wrapped package to place it into the outbound post route rack. As Milos pulled out the package, he was beside himself with the uncanniness of this package to the one he’d found in the bottom of his bag – or that he’d thought he’d found in the bottom of his bag earlier that day.

Milos knew that he was being paranoid, but he turned over the package and found written on the back:

“4218 Cherry Blossom Street. Sign for Delivery.”

Milos’s heart skipped a beat. He gripped the package hard and hurried out of the post office. Cherry Blossom Street was about a 15-minute walk away, but Milos ran and arrived there in half the time, panting, delirious, eager.

Milos stepped in front of the Thai residence's yard and crept along the edge of the house across the perfectly manicured lawn until he arrived at the entrance of a the backyard. No longer was there a wall of banana trees, but rather the door to a rickshaw, held open buy its driver .

He glanced back at the quiet street, then again towards the entire city of Bombay beyond his humble transportation, awaiting, took a deep breath and stepped up and into the seat, package gripped tightly in one hand, hoping this time, he would not be returning to Connecticut.