Prompt 6 (Mysterious Mail): The mail is always bad this time of year, but it seems like something's gone a little extra wrong. You’ve received something that’s not quite right. Maybe it’s a box that looks like it’s from a completely different era, wrapped in brown paper and tied with dark twine. The box has scuffs and scrapes and a yellowed name tag--with your name and address on it. There is no return address and no indication where it came from. If you open it up you will find some sort of timeless item that feels as though it is easily decades old. It may not be particularly valuable, but this item seems to have been lost to time--and somehow ended up in your possession. Any time you look at it you are filled with the same sensation of timelessness.

Maybe it’s an old letter with no return address, no name on it; it's impossible to tell who it is from or how it got there, given that it might have arrived in your mailbox, your front door, or maybe it even just showed up inside your house. If you open it, the letter is dated from decades ago and contains some surprising information; it is a letter lost to time and contains some secret. The content of the letter is up to the player; it might contain a confession of love, an admission of guilt, the secret of some crime--no matter what the letter contains, it leaves you with news to reflect on. Do you try to seek out anyone mentioned in the letter? Do you investigate or try to hand the letter over to someone else? Does the content of the letter reflect your life in some way? ...Do you have to worry about someone breaking into your house to leave strangely coded messages?

Maybe you’ve gotten both and really need to phone up the post office to see what’s going on.

Tanwyn avoided the downtown area as much as he could. Just a few months prior, he had lived there with his family. His wife and son. Now they were both gone, and it felt like every single building he passed held some significance toward those relationships.

The rec center he was teaching his son to swim at.

The Ruth’s Chris he’d taken his wife to on their first date.

The hospital their son had been born at.

The bake shop they’d pass every day, and Isa would say in her most wistful tone, ’Someday, I’d like to run my own bakery… A cat café, even!’ And he would tell her that it was completely in the realm of possibility! Someday. When they were more well off or more prepared or whenever their son was grown and out of the house. Whatever the excuse of the day was.

And now that day wouldn’t ever be coming in this lifetime. Everything Tanwyn had envisioned for his family, dispersed in a moment. He couldn’t stand to drive down to his house, an admittedly crappy two-bed-one-bath situation- but that he and his wife had owned! It was theirs!

The only reason he swung by was to briskly tend to maintenance and gather the mail. He didn’t need the place, anymore, so it needed to be in condition enough to sell, and he couldn’t exactly afford gardeners or handymen willy-nilly. Mowing the lawn and keeping dust from accumulating in between potential buyers was the least he could do. Anytime he walked in, he still felt a little blindsided by how average it looked on the inside, since his last night here had been fraught with mess in all the most unimaginable ways.

Tanwyn didn’t ask who Rakovanite had enlisted to expunge any obvious signs of struggle from the house, didn’t ask why no one had spoken to Tanwyn about missing persons, didn’t ask how two people could just be gone and it not influence his personal record. He didn’t want to know. He’d been scared and distraught and destroyed, and his friend had handled everything Tanwyn didn’t know how to do. He wouldn’t ask. Didn’t know if he could handle it. Could barely handle walking into this building with a straight face.

But he had to. He didn’t want this burden, anymore. He had to get rid of it, sell it off to whoever would take it.

A proper clean would only take an hour or two. The house was small, but Tanwyn could hardly stomach that much. He couldn’t bring himself to set foot in the kitchen, despite how it had been cleared of any leavings. Couldn’t walk into his son’s room. Couldn’t open the door to the bathroom he’d coiled up in until Nataniel had made it to him.

For everything else, he wiped the dust off the ceiling fans, packed a box (because more than one was asking too much) of trinkets off the mantle, and managed to lift a set of hung clothes from the rack and his closet, and… slop them onto the floor, because partway through the motion, he’d realized he didn’t have a place for them. Hadn’t brought a box big enough to accommodate all that, and he had to get out of here. Had to get out, had to leave right now, couldn’t stand to be in this house for another second, or he would lose it right there.

Tanwyn scrambled out of the closet in his bedroom, leaving the wad of clothing right where it’d fallen. He tore back toward the front door, snatching his keys off the side table before whipping out the door and slamming it shut behind him. It was only because it was immediately in his eyesight as he turned that he remembered to grab the mail out of the box on the front paneling.

It wouldn’t be until later, back in his borrowed room at Nataniel and Basyl’s place that Tanwyn would bother even absently flipping through the mail.

Trash, mostly. A huge pile of advertisements for credit cards and whole newspapers of fast food coupons. A scattering of bills, some addressed to him and some not. And one card, with no sender and no address, with only a single word printed on the front in large, messy, uncoordinated scrawl: Daddy.

Tanwyn’s eyes immediately welled with hot tears.

It would’ve been written months ago at earliest. It had no postage, no name. How would it under up in his letterbox now? A teacher from the spring? Maybe just finished passing out letters the students had written? Or something one of Rakovanite’s cleaners had found lost under the stove or tucked in a pile of papers on the counter, left to him now because it had ‘been long enough?’ Tanwyn had no way of knowing. Maybe it was none of that, and it was just the ever-elusive magic working him over because it could.

He let his fingers trace over the barely-legible letterwork of a young boy. The things this letter could say… Limited, realistically. Liam’s vocabulary wasn’t terribly advanced, for a four-year-old. But Tanwyn was sure it said all the typical schoolkid-writing-a-letter-to-a-parent type of things. Words of love, and how he was looked up to, and…

But he couldn’t bring himself to peel back the flap, to lift the edge of the tape and slip the paper from the envelope. So Tanwyn would never know what it actually said. At least, not right now. He couldn’t get there, mentally, knew that it would only leave him distraught and alone the rest of the day, curled up in his room and wishing for different. He wanted to know what his son had written him, but it didn’t matter what the letter said, because anything would ruin him.

Tanwyn exhaled a shaky breath and slipped the sealed envelope in between the lamp and the water glass he kept at the side of his bed. Some day, he’d have that mental fortitude. He’d be able to look back and at least remember fond things mixed in with the despair.

Not today. Today, he could only wallow in anguish at the thought that there was anything his son had left behind for him.

WC: 1038