The Junk Mail Revolution

By Toiya Kristen Finley

Jade Pickney walked into 5 Southigh Lane--her parka freezing and soaking wet, her hair drooping tendrils--after a nightmare day at work. In aisle 7, three teenage boys decided to play cart jockey.   They ran the cart straight into the shelf, spilling gherkins all over the floor. Jade spent two hours with Tommy Joe mopping up the scene and dumping pickles in a bucket while angry customers demanded to get down the aisle. And then, right when she was ready to go home, she and a trail of customers in her line waited for a woman to take item after item back after she discovered she didn't have enough money.

The only thing Jade had to look forward to after this waste of a day was the postcard from Aruba her sweetie promised her. He wasn't getting back for another two weeks, and he said the postcard was on its way a week ago. Since then, Jade came home and stuck her hand in the bottom of the mailbox hoping she overlooked it, but there was nothing there. So, today she knew it had to have arrived. Her sweetie had a way of knowing how to cheer her up, and this ability wouldn't be lost even with him hundreds of miles away. Jade faced her mailbox hoping to see diamond white sand peeking through the slit, but some fliers and a circular greeted her. She snatched them out of her box and shuffled through them--a seven-paged circular from her grocery store, an advertising from an e-publisher wondering if she had written the great American novel, and a leaflet for a dried-meat company. Jade felt the blood run to her face and warm over her cheeks. The other tenants dropped their junk mail in the doorway, but Jade shoved hers back into the mailbox. She refused to receive mail from anyone until she got her sweetie's postcard.

The next afternoon, when Mrs. Mayfair at 5 Southigh Lane checked to see if Mickey the postman had arrived, she noticed the neighboring box was stuffed with yesterday's mail. She got her own mail--a sliver of paper advertising senior benefits from an insurance company, an international envelope with red and blue stripes reading "I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET IN TOUCH WITH YOU," a grocery circular, and an invitation to join BUMP 'N GRIND Wholesale Music Service. Mrs.Mayfair carried her mail back to her apartment and dumped the papers from the insurance company and music club in the trash. But she wondered who in the world could have mailed her from over seas? Maybe one of those little homeless village boys from Africa she saw so much on TV, or an anonymous pen pal from Switzerland, or--Guam! Mrs. Mayfair opened her precious envelope making sure she didn't rip it.  This was one she'd have to keep in her scrapbook. A flimsy slip of tissue paper fell from the envelope and onto the floor. Picking it up, Mrs. Mayfair adjusted her glasses and read, "You may already have won $50,000!" The address: Sarasota, Florida.

"Gladys," she said to her best friend over the phone, "mail is lying to us."

"Oh, I know, Winnie dear. Just today I thought I'd received a letter from a child in New Guinea. Turns out somebody in Jersey wanted me to buy a bunch of magazines! And I just can't tell you how much the circular from the store hurt me. Well, Winnie, you remember when butter was 5¢. Now you can't get a decent tub of margarine for $1.29!  Oh, but what are we going to do?"

"I'll tell you!" Mrs. Mayfair yelled. "We're going to put it all back!" She pumped her fist in the air. "Listen, Gladys, they keep on raising prices on us because they have to pay for all the paper they send. And we don't have to accept mail disguised as letters from underprivileged village children." She hung up the phone and took
the mail she discarded out of the trash and stamped "Return to Sender" on everything she received that day.

***

Mickey the postman hated his job. He used to love taking cards and gift baskets, letters and new merchandise--even the bills--to the people on his route. But for the past two weeks, he found getting into the doorways of apartment buildings difficult, and he had to be careful not to slip on the growing mounds of paper on porches and sidewalks. Mickey opened the entrance to 5 Southigh Lane. Fifteen cards from the car wash a block over spilled into the street. Each had "Return to Sender" stamped in red on top of the picture of the blond girl stretched across the Corvette. Mickey sighed, waded through the sea of four-color sheets, reached up, and placed the mail behind the mailboxes.

"This is ridiculous," he said to the other workers when he got back to the post office. "We can't take much more of this."

Sheryl, her uniform stained with ink, nodded. "Joey slipped on a deodorant sample and broke his ankle."

"Our work is a hazard," Butch said. "I say we threaten to strike unless the government does something about this. I have to admit I'm tired of getting cheddar cheese and strudel pamphlets myself."

***

Several advertising executives from various companies gathered to discuss the ramifications of the Junk Mail Revolution in the Surely Packed Meats boardroom. Paper littered the streets. It floated on top of rivers and lakes. Environmentalists yelled at companies over the phone, and mailrooms at cooperative conglomerates stacked to the ceiling with fliers, circulars, leaflets, and pamphlets the Postal Service refused to deliver.

***

"There's not much we can do," said Bly Evans of Rent-a-Sound. "If the people refuse our mail, we can't force it into their boxes."

Sid Frebing of PerfeGifts slammed his fist on the table. "Don't these idiots know that we're providing them a free service? How would they know about that new book offer if it weren't for us? Would they know when the sale ends? Would they have a chance to win a million dollars?  I think not!"

"Of course we know that," said Bly, "but how to convince the people?"

Tiffany Fitzberger of Surely Packed Meats folded her hands and pressed her elbows on the table. "Gentlemen and women, we are not going to be able to convince the people."

They looked at her with despair.

But she smiled. "So we won't send them any more mail for a while. They'll come begging us for information. Just wait."

***

Jade Pickney walked into 5 Southigh Lane--her parka freezing and soaking wet, her hair drooping tendrils--after a decent day of work. A muddy slush of circulars and pamphlets stuck to her legs and colored her pants the same water-washed blues, reds, greens, and yellows painting the street and sidewalk. Jade's sweetie was in Germany and promised to send her a box of chocolates. That was three weeks ago. She stuck her hand in the bottom of the mailbox and found nothing.  Not even a bill. She'd received so little mail within the last month, and all of the tenants' mailboxes hung empty on the wall, starving.

"Miss Pickney, is that you dear?"

Jade turned away from her mailbox and looked at Mrs. Mayfair standing in the hallway. Mrs. Mayfair gave her a slight wave--the old woman's hands dyed a permanent red from her vigorous "Return to Sender" campaign. Jade waved back.

"Um, hello, Mrs. Mayfair."

"I know you work down at Save-U-Time. Are they running any specials this week?"

Jade's eyes fogged over. She hadn't seen anything posted around the store, and people tried to slip expired three-month old coupons past the cashiers. "I don't know, Mrs. Mayfair. I haven't heard anything."

Outside of Surely Packed Meats wails of "Is Cheap-o-Purchase running a sale on eggs?" "Who has the best deals on dining sets?" and "Are those little kids in Tanzania okay?" rose above the tri-state-area streets and hovered beneath the boardroom window.

Within the boardroom at Surely Packed Meats, Tiffany Fitzberger would have led the ad executives in triumphant laughter, but underneath mountains of undelivered junk mail, they had already begun to drown.
 

About the Author
A retired professional student, Toiya Kristen Finley received her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from Binghamton University in 2003.  She now finds herself back in her native wilds of Nashville, TN working as a freelancer of various stuffs. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in pop culture encyclopedias, Citizen Culture, The Elastic Book of Numbers, Tales of the Unanticipated, Fortean Bureau, Full Unit Hookup, NFG, H.P. Lovecraft's Magazine of Horror and Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America. She is the founding and former managing/fiction editor of Harpur Palate.
 

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