A Letter
“What is it?” Jaedyn wondered aloud.
“Dunno,” replied Mia.
Their general bewilderment soon lured a small crowd of colleagues away from the sizzling BBQ of the staff Christmas party.
“Does it move?” asked Krista.
“Not sure, let’s see…”
“NO, don’t touch it,” shrieked Jaedyn, drawing in a shallow breath. “It might be dangerous.”
“Wait, I know,” assured Krista, and she snapped a photo of the mysterious object with her phone, before referring it to her omniscient operating system.
“Unable to complete request,” came the reply.
The sudden exodus from the BBQ and the general state of confusion soon attracted George, the longest-serving employee of the post office, whose age and experience distanced him from his colleagues but lent him a modicum of respect.
All eyes soon fell upon him.
George noted the twitching, restless squirming of his impatient young colleagues and indulged himself for a few cheeky moments, before finally declaring,
“It’s a letter.”
“What’s a letter?” snapped Jaedyn.
But before Jaedyn had finished his retort, his colleagues leapt to their phones.
“…any of the set of symbols used to write a language, representing a sound in the language…” read Mia.
“No,” replied George, who was about to correct Mia’s error when Kye interjected,
“a written message from one person to another, usually put in an envelope and sent by post,” he read smugly. Kye’s pride was dampened, however, when the exasperated septuagenarian extracted every phone from every hand and placed them behind the dirty dishes piling up in the small kitchenette – a corner of the office his audience never visited.
“Before we had the internet, we used to write letters to each other,” George began patiently, before explaining the process of using a pen or pencil to write messages on paper, then placing them in an envelope. At the mention of the word ‘envelope’, hands reached for phones, but clutched at thin air.
George lightly tapped the envelope.
“This is an envelope.” The crowd was shocked when George didn’t blow up, and even more shocked when he described the process of licking the envelope to secure the contents.
George then outlined the process of placing the envelope in the post and waiting an indeterminate amount of time for it to arrive at its destination.
“OMG!” cried Krista, whose palpable excitement set her sparkling, bauble earrings jingling.
“I have to post this right now!”
“Finally,” sighed George quietly, relieved that his history lesson had succeeded.
‘Click’
Krista snapped a photo on her second phone and with a few swipes the letter and its attendant hashtags appeared on facebook, twitter, snapchat, Instagram, viber, whatsapp, messenger, pinterest…
The letter had been posted all over the world, without moving an inch.
The crowd soon found another distraction, and left George alone with the letter.
He noticed a tiny bump in the envelope, and saw a few frames of photographic film. Relieved he didn’t have to explain photographic film to his colleagues, he lifted the envelope to the light.
“What is it?”
Image: Diana Akhmetianova