Cristal

Delivery

by Vivian Darkbloom

The white metal mailbox is surrounded by chattering birds. We don’t quite know where, but it is a rural neighborhood, and the weather is warm. Balmy, with a slight breeze, not too hot. Across the way we can see the corner of a chicken coop peeking out from behind a hedgerow. Out of sight further on is a farm house and fields planted with rows of corn. Large wonderful trees with enormous leaves grow all around. The road is unassuming, narrow and recently paved, with no lines on it. Cars pass infrequently, and when two are proceeding in the opposite direction, the pavement is slender enough that one of them will need to pull at least partially off the road to let the other by.

As it happens, we just missed catching the mail delivery person, a young blonde woman in uniform shorts with deliciously long legs who had been humming a song by the Beatles. I’m not quite sure what the song was, but it was one of the charming love songs from one of their earliest albums, before they started getting all pompous and prissy. “Love Me Do” or something like that.

The white mailbox is now empty aside from two items, two white envelopes of slightly different sizes. One has a window with the address showing, and the other is a plain envelope with the address neatly handwritten. They might not have been worthy of mention, had they not been emblematic of the life of the owner of the mailbox, for whom they were destined. He will be out to pick them up in a minute. His name is Oliver.

Also emblematic of his life is the emptiness of the mailbox. In practical terms, the electronic age had all but suffocated physical mail services. Only those who stubbornly clung to the old ways were still partial to it. When he would open the mail box, its emptiness would strike a subconscious chord of this resonance, and he would sigh.

So you probably want to know what’s in the envelopes. The one with a window is simple enough. It contains a check, for a patent submitted years ago. A monthly payment, substantial enough to support a reasonable lifestyle, but nothing extravagant. The patent was for work done with a certain form of technology involving the formation and manipulation of crystals for the purpose of communicating data. It was a minuscule excursion into the potential of the realm he was beginning to explore, but like many ideas it did not jibe with the methods favored by the higher levels of management, which were primarily optimal for their profit-making properties.

And so, like many inventions such as the electric car or hemp textiles, it was squashed for the expediency of those who had too much and wanted more. Oliver’s reward was that he was let go (or laid off, however one wishes to word it) with enough income to keep him from being inclined to cause trouble, but not sufficient in order to pursue the research that he had started on, which would have benefited society and humankind as a whole.

As for the second envelope, it tells the second part of the story: the triumph of money over knowledge. Someone in power, Oliver couldn’t quite figure out who, had spread rumors that the technology he was researching was entirely useless. Rubbish. A waste of effort. He heard this sentiment echoed at every turn. Each painstaking attempt he had made at securing grant money for research over the past decade terminated after much promise and anticipation in a brief, vague rejection. In the second envelope is one of those rejections.

Here he comes now, walking down the flagstone path from his house, down to the mailbox.


Oliver opened the mailbox, and sighed. He glanced at the familiar envelope with the window, giving a wry smile. He shuffled the other one to the top of the deck, and frowned curiously, tearing it open. Before long, the familiar disappointment set in, as he read between the lines of the words, reflecting the sentence he had been doled out, to a life on the sidelines.

Annoyed, he slammed the box shut. It closed with a smooth solidity.

“It’s about time you’re awake, already. Lazybones.”

That was the voice of Cristal, his next-door neighbor. He was slightly embarrassed when he realized that she had been watching his whole interaction with the mailbox and its contents, from her place of partial concealment behind a leafy shrub. Jasmine.

“Hi, toots,” he said absently, pronouncing ‘toots’ so that it rhymed with ‘foots.’ “How’s my favorite eight-year-old today?”

Predictably she was subtly miffed, though she kept smiling. “You always say that. I’m almost nine now, anyway.” Her voice trailed off at the end of the sentence.

Her long hair was blonde and wavy, almost to the point that one might refer to it as ‘curly.’ It was so light that one might nearly call it ‘platinum,’ its natural shade. Her features were long but rounded, and possessed a distinct beauty that was striking even on first glance. She wore a pink sleeveless top with wiggly yellow stripes around it, and dark blue shorts that were honestly too small, even aside from the sparseness of the cut. Her dainty toenails were painted in a shade of pink that echoed that of her shirt. Her skill at color matching was remarkable, and the overall effect was little short of mind-blowing.

“Whatcha doing today?” she asked, as she always did.

“Breathing. Talking to you,” he replied.

She leapt up and slapped his shoulder gently. “You always say that,” she said.

He grinned. “What a coincidence. It always seems to wind up being true, when I’m talking to you,” he said. “How about yourself? You’re the one who’s young and full of exuberance and bright ideas. I think you should be the one to entertain me.”

“Well, my mom and dad left on vacation. For Las Vegas.”

“Sounds like fun. Who’s taking care of you?”

“They said you would. Especially ’cause I’m always over here at your house anyway.”

“They said what?” he exploded quietly.

“Don’t be mad at me,” she protested. “We’ll have a great time together.”

“Like fun we will,” he groused.

“I’ll go get my suitcase,” she said.

“Where are you staying?” he asked, still slow to catch on.

“At your house, silly.

“And I gave you permission to do this, when?” he replied, immediately regretting that he had ever said it. She looked like she was about to cry.

He bent down and rested his hands gently on her upper back. “Now don’t do that,” he said.

She shook him off, and turned away, sobbing. “Nobody cares about me,” she cried, her back to him. She scuffed her toe in the dirt.

“That’s not true,” he said quietly.

As she watched her cry, a dull ache grew in his heart. The whole story flashed through his mind. Cristal’s mother and father were soundly in the category of what Oliver would refer to as ‘trash.’ The yard full of broken junk, dead cars, and promises of repair that would never be fulfilled. The house swarming with crass partiers and drug dealers. Which is why Oliver allowed her over in the first place: to give her refuge from all the stupid drama and bad influences. So far, he couldn’t bring himself to do anything more official about it, having heard horror stories of children relegated to terrible foster homes. Not that the homes were all that way, of course, but was it worth the risk? On days like today he wasn’t so sure.

“Listen,” he said, sitting down in the tall green grass growing out of the dusty ground near his front walk. “I didn’t mean it.”

She continued sobbing. He thought of how it must feel to her, to have her main caregivers abandon her so carelessly. And now here he was, treating her the same way. It wasn’t right.

“Listen,” he repeated, reaching out to her, gently pulling her over to him. She collapsed into his lap, still crying, though less. She buried her head in his chest, and he could feel the warmth of her wet tears soaking his grey T-shirt. “Don’t worry,” he said, stroking her hair. “I’ll take care of you. I have no idea what I’m doing, but we’ll find a way. OK?”

Wordlessly, she looked up at him with enormous green eyes, and threw her arms around his neck, clinging fiercely.

“Can I have an OK? Hey, loosen up a little, love. You’re strangling me.”

She loosened her grip a little, putting her face right in front of his and pursing her lips. He was sure she was about to kiss him.

“Can I have an ‘OK?’” he asked to her face.”

“OK,” she echoed quietly.

“Can I get up and have my breakfast now?” he asked.

“Breakfast?” she demanded, almost cheerful again. “Why are you eating breakfast when it’s time for lunch?”

“Then I hope you like having french toast for lunch,” he said.

“So long as you have raspberry jam,” she proclaimed.

He sighed. He could see how this was going to go. “No, and I will not be going to the store before I eat. I suppose we will go shopping later on, so that tomorrow you can have raspberry jam, and any other monstrosities that your little heart desires.”

She grinned. “Gummy bears.”

He gave her an exasperated look.

“I’ll get my suitcase,” she said, running a little ways up the road.

“Please tell me you don’t have a pink suitcase,” he muttered, not intending for her to hear. But her ears were good.

“It’s not pink, it’s green,” she said, hauling out a large, fluorescent green rectangular piece of luggage from where it had been, behind a clump of grass. Apparently her mom and dad had just dropped her off there to wait.

“More like chartreuse, I’d call it,” commented Oliver. “Do you want some help with that?”

“It’s green,” she repeated, dragging it clumsily along the path with one hand, her other holding a book, open to the page she had apparently been reading. “And I don’t need any help. I’m a big girl.”

“I see,” he said wryly. “OK, then. No help.”

He retrieved the envelopes from where he had set them in the dust, and started back down the path to his front door. “I’m going to go blind from all these bright colors,” he complained.

She laughed. “Silly. Of course not. Maybe you just need a little color in your life.”

“If I don’t get epilepsy first, from the flashing diodes on your sneakers.”

“I’m not wearing sneakers,” she said.

“I know,” he replied, “but when you do.”

He held the door for her while she wrestled her belongings over the threshold. As she closed it, she marched down the hallway to his bedroom and hoisted the suitcase up on to his bed, where it bounced as she dropped it.

“And where might you be sleeping, then?” he murmured. “I suppose I’ll need to find a cot somewhere.”

He stepped into the bathroom to examine his appearance in the mirror. His hair needed combing, and he ran his fingers through the week-old growth of beard, thinking about what to do with it.

He felt a soft bump against his butt, and the door slammed abruptly closed beside him. She was taking off her clothes.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“I need to change into my bathing suit,” she said, holding it up to show him, then throwing it on the floor. Entirely naked now, she put the seat down on the toilet and sat, releasing a stream of piss into the water below.

Now his heart was doing another kind of dance, and he felt the pleasant stiffness of arousal, in spite of himself. His mouth dropped open.

He had never seen her naked before, and the suddenness of it caught him off guard. He would not have thought that such a young body could have pulled the threads of sexual attraction, but he found himself staring at the skin folds her pretty little pussy, imagining that it was moist inside, and wondering what it would feel like to press his finger into her tiny opening.

She noticed him staring and laughed. She looked down at where his shorts had begun to bulge. He felt ashamed at his response, which only increased it.

“I think I see something,” she said, reaching over. To his horror, she cupped her hand down the length of his engorged penis. He felt a tingle where she touched him, through the cloth of his shorts.

She grabbed the elastic around his waist, starting to pull them down, before he came to his senses.

“Babe, stop,” he exclaimed helplessly. “I could get into so much trouble.”

It was then that they were startled by the sound of an alarmingly long, loud, rapid, but evenly measured knock at the front door. It was a knock with a particular meaning and intention, which if it could have spoken would have said: “I am an official knock. You will not sleep through me. You will not ignore me. If you do, the person knocking will find a way to let themselves in, which might involve breaking something.”

Oliver’s poor heart, already under assault, jumped up into his throat.

“Get dressed,” he hissed angrily. “I’ll go see who it is.”

His garment snapped back as she released it, looking up at him with a sheepishly coy expression.

Scowling, he exited the bathroom and slammed the door. “Coming!” he said, raising his voice.

When he opened his front door, he found himself facing a man in uniform.





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