It all began with a black envelope. My mother and I stopped at an antique to look for old-fashioned flower pots to put in the garden when her eyes fell upon it. The envelope was the color of ashes, and its borders were limned in faux gold. I watched as she stopped in her tracks and picked it up, turning it over in her hand, the price tag dangling from its corner. “$1.00”, it said. She ignored everything else, went up to the cash register and bought it. I thought it was a puzzling purchase, but my mother is eccentric, so I didn’t think much of it. When we got home, she spent all day in her office simply staring at the envelope, marveling at its clean edges and glimmering lines.

“But…it’s just an envelope.” I said.

“No…it’s more than that. This one is special,” she said, “I can feel a history behind it.”

She picked it up, sniffed it, and ran her finger through its inside. I didn’t see what history she was talking about. Heck, I didn’t even see a brand name, nothing. It was just a plain black envelope with fake gold lining its edges. Nevertheless, the parchment entranced her, and she spent the rest of the day fondling it, smelling it, and admiring it.

When I woke up the next morning, I found a plain white envelope sticking through the bottom of my door. I picked it up, opened it to find a handwritten letter from her.

“Darling, I hope you have a good day today! Your breakfast is on the table! Isn’t this such a fun way to leave messages? Love, Mother.”

I was a little weirded out, but I put the letter on my desk. I found some bacon and eggs she had prepared for me. Father was there and grunted a greeting when he saw me enter. Mom was nowhere to be seen.

“Your mother has taken up a new hobby,” he said, as if reading my unspoken question, “she is writing letters.”

“Huh…” I muttered.

School was the same that it always was: dull and boring. Classes slogged on, I talked to a cute boy or two, but still, my education was a practice in tedium and monotony. Before school ended, a teacher pulled me over and told me that mom had stopped by to drop off a letter for me. When I opened it, I saw that she wanted me to have a good day. This was weird, even for her, but I didn’t think too much of it.

“Hey…Sarah.” a boy named John said.

“Hey John…how are you?” I responded. John was normally shy. He was a nice guy, but he didn’t speak much. He always seemed to wear this mask of gloom and doom on his face, looking at the ground, avoiding eye contact. It probably had something to do with the fact that his parents were killed in a scrapbooking incident, so he lived by himself.

“I’m good…” he said, “but there’s...something weird about this town.”

“Huh…” I didn’t know what else to say. Good thing too because the shuttle pulled up to the bus stop. When I got home later, I called out to let my parents know I was back.

“Come in here hon!” my mother said, “I want you to see what I’ve been doing!”

“Okay, just a second.” I put my backpack on the table and went to her office.

When I opened the door, I saw piles and piles of envelopes on her desk, letters that had been sealed shut with wax. Where she got the wax from, I had no idea. Without looking up at me, she was in the process of addressing a new envelope, the tip of her pen scratching against the paper. Her fingers were chapped and raw.

“Uh…hey Mom.” I said, “What are all these for?”

“Oh…you know.” Mom said.

“I…I actually don’t.”

“I just…I really like writing letters to people. I didn’t know that until recently. By writing things down…I feel like I am putting a piece of myself in each piece of paper.”

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“Um…who are you sending them to?” I asked.

“Oh…friends, relatives, our neighbors.” she said, holding up the envelope she’d been working on. She licked the edges and sealed it shut. “I left one for your father this morning, and another one is waiting for you upstairs.”

“That’s…nice…but don’t you think people will think that’s a little weird? I mean…”

She spun around in her chair to look at me. “What’s weird about it?” she asked, “I’m just writing letters. What’s weird about that? Don’t you think we should write letters to each other more often?”

“But we have texting and…”

“It is NOT the same!” she snapped, uncharacteristically angry. Then she softened a bit. “It’s not the same…sweetheart. A letter is intimate…a letter is part of us. In some ways…I can be the letter. I swear…I could fold myself up into an envelope and mail myself. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Fold…yourself up?” I was puzzled by the question.

“Yes…fold myself up and tuck myself into an envelope, then have somebody mail me,” she said, “I think I could do it eventually…look.”

After she said this, she held her hand up and folded it backwards impossibly until the backside of her palm touched her forearm. It was as if the bones and muscle inside her wrist had turned into rubber. She held up her other hand and did the same: bending it backwards until the angle was uncanny. She was definitely acting a bit strange.

“Mom…are you all right?” I asked.

“I’ve never been better.” She said, her hands flopping around like gloves.

“Okay then.” I left her office, mildly weirded out. I found my Dad in the kitchen again, he grunted at me a second time. I skipped dinner and I went straight to bed, ignoring the letter mother had left for me. I awoke the next morning to find several more letters under my door. I didn’t have time to read them all, so I picked them up and left them on my desk. Mom was still in her office, I could hear her scratching away at the letters.

I came home later that day, and I could see the light on in her office, but it was silent. I put my backpack on the table and started on my homework for the day. As I scribbled away at the math problems, I thought of my mother’s chapped fingers. I thought of the way she bent her hands backwards. There was something unusual about that for sure. Father, who was watching TV, got up and went over to the fridge to grab a beer.

“Why don’t you go check on your mother?” he said, “she’s been in there all day. Ask her if she’s going to make us dinner or if we’re on our own.”

Sighing with frustration, I put down my pencil, got up, and walked over to her office.

“Mom?” I said, knocking on the door lightly. No response. I said her name and knocked on the door again, still no response. I then noticed that a few scattered letters littered the hallway, so I picked them up, organized them into a bundle and knocked on the door a third time. Silence. So, I opened the door.

Greeting my eyes was a scene that took many moments to process. Time seemed to slow and my mind came to a standstill. Mother’s desk had become a shrine. A mantel of letters enshrouded an empty, mostly unoccupied space on the desk, illuminated by the tabletop lantern. In the focus of this light was a large bulging envelope. In the address bar, the words “anywhere my heart desires” were written. A few fingers stuck out of the seams, their joints mangled and broken. A face stretched across the window in the envelope, eyes deformed until they resembled beans, the mouth torn between a grimace and a scream. My mother had folded herself up and tucked herself into an envelope, her body contorted beyond all recognition save for the harrowing countenance stretched across the envelope’s port.

“Mom?” I said, picking the letter up, a few drops of blood seeping though the paper. “Are you all right? You’re acting weird.”

I opened the letter up and dumped her compacted body onto the desk, her nude twisted form bunched into a square, her tongue lulled out of her squished face.

“Mom, are you all right? Are you going to make us dinner?” I asked. There was something weird going on, I was certain of it.

A week had passed since my mother’s death. School was not the same since then. In fact, our entire town seemed to change. Before her death, my mother had sent out letters to my neighbors, many of whom developed a similar fascination with them. They began to act strangely, obsessed with the thoughts of mailing themselves.

“Hey…Sarah…” John said to me one day after school.

“Hey John…”

“There’s something wrong with this town. I can feel it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Behind him, a teacher was trying to tuck himself into a manila envelope, screaming as his leg folded.

“I mean…don’t you think there’s something weird going on? We should leave this place.” He said. The teacher behind him folded his other leg, the substance of his body becoming like putty. Slowly, but surely, he began to disappear entirely into the envelope, wriggling more and more of himself into its edges. His face stretched, his eyes popped out, and his fingers elongated, deflating.

“Maybe…” I said, “But…I mean…I know people are acting weird lately, but it’s our home.”

“Maybe you’re right.” John said. “It’s just…something is wrong. Like…we are cursed. This entire town is cursed. And we should get out of it as soon as possible. But instead…maybe we should stick around…for no reason.”

“Is this about your parents?” I asked.

“No. Just…let’s forget about it.” He said.

“Okay. “

A few envelopes blew by our feet and I thought I heard wailing coming from their seams, but I ignored it. It was probably my imagination. So, I took John’s hand and we both walked off into the sunset.