Michael Malone - Weebly

CONCERNING LETTERS
The power of the post office is awful. There stands
Judith Haig, sorting lives, collecting decisions,
distributing possibilities. In the hands of a satanic
humorist, or even a careless carrier (Mrs. Haig is
neither), futures could be randomly redistributed,
happiness returned to its sender, undelivered. Mail that
is government-inspected (and microfilmed, too) has
always seemed scary to A.A. Hayes. But now he has
also begun to worry about Dingley Falls's anonymous
letters.
As he told himself, when slightly intoxicated: "Some
sadistic bastard is hand-stamping on the scribbles of the
human heart. And we can no more escape what's being
said about us than we can escape that bully the
telephone, or that s.o.b. the IRS."
None of the townspeople have reported these
written slanders officially to Chief Haig in order that the
culprit might be legally pursued, though gossip about the
letters has been rampant. Few people prefer to have
even a maniac's analysis of their psyches read into a