A Venture Into Fiction (for a change!)

(This is the idea for a short story I got this evening so I thought I would start writing here in my blog and see where the exercise and mood took me. Hope it proves to be at least somewhat amusing for anyone reading my stuff...)

Return to Sender - Cyberaddress Unknown

Initially, it did not seem unusual. A misdirected email was not something that never happened, afterall. And with a common name ("Jane Doe" was more memorable) it was not unusual to receive several misdirected or mass generated advertising emails within a fairly short span of time. So what was it about this one that had grabbed her attention?

Email, usually so impersonal and free from the emotional baggage of telephone conversation, was easily deleted and forgotten. Most email was spam or junk anyway, so why keep this one on the computer; why open it and read it? What was it about that email that drew her eyes to the screen?

Somehow, despite the depersonalization of all of the more modern forms of communication, despite the delightful anonymity offered by a keyboard and computer screen, this email stood out. It was not bookmarked, earmarked, marked for any sort of automatic response and did not request a response from the reader prior to reading or upon receipt. It asked no acknowledgement whatsoever, in computer savvy terms at least. The only discrepancy in the address was in the little "a" thingy (or is that an ampersand? Or is an ampersand the backwards s-like sqiggle whatsit used for "and" instead of "at" in email addresses?) used for "at" in the email; address itself. Her middle initial was a "A." which was de-capitalized by the system into a lower case "a" in her email address and placed immediately before the little "at" thingy. Someone had mistyped the address to include the lower case "a" and then added the other whatsit not realizing they should have deleted the "a" before hitting send - or so she assumed, not able to fathom any other reason for the arrival in her emailbox of the cybermissive instead of the obviously-not-her intended recipient.

Finally, after all of this not very useful speculative cognition, she realized that the fascination of this email, aside from her pathetically slow and boring existence at the moment, was that it arrived spattered in blood and mystery, a mystery far beyond any issue of address or misdirection. It was plaintive; a cry for help, a dying word, a final "I love you," uttered upon the airwaves. It was the last breathe of a soul reaching out to the only one who cared or could possibly save them. Her mind raced with the possible explainations, her imagination running wild with the unspoken potentialities of this short electronic cypher: "It's over. We've won. My only regret is never seeing you again. My lips are yours forever..." The sending email address had somehow been blocked, leaving no way to return a message or trace a sender. She suddenly felt like the heroine in a very badly written romance novel of questionable literary value; utterly bereft but with pulse still pounding.

Catching her breath for a moment, she shook her head and tried to regain some small vestige of a sense of reality. It would not do to spend the rest of the day walking around in a mental haze made up of too many Harlequin romance novels and late nights spent chain-reading them until 4 am. Perhaps it was the physical restraint of the email that brought all of this out in her. In these more modern times blunt sexuality was more usual on the internet than the subtlety of a statement like "My lips are yours forever..." Feeling mildly frustrated that the author of the email was too polite to have been a little more graphic, but still immensely curious, she set out to see if her server could pry loose any information as to the origins of the email. She knew it was not intended for her and thereby felt some small pang of guilt at this obvious violation of the sender's, and the intended recipient's, privacy, but she comforted herself with the thought that she was really just trying to get the message delivered to the proper address without stopping to think of the multitude of possible consequences meddling with such a personal and obviously anonymous email could bring. Life can be a series of hard lessons, even on the brightest days.

_________________*****

This is as far as I have gotten. I'm not sure whether I want to finish the story or not, but will try to do that here in my blog in case there is any curiosity about the ending - which is currently undecided.

We have been trying to recover from virii of varying types here in the mean time and take turns coughing and gurggling and blowing our noses. Our ears are kind of stopped up, too, so the cacophony (I really like this word!) of coughing is tolerable and at least we are able to manage some sleep at night. The cats sleep no matter what and do not have colds. I am jealous.

There is so much to do it all seems to coalesce into one large and unmanageable tangle that takes more energy than I often have to untangle, but things do get accomplished despite the perspective, just not as rapidly as we often wish we could accomplish them. Oh well.

Hopefully, those who may encounter this blog are healthier, more energetic, and much better organized than we are right now.

Blessings,
Izzlebug