Story Time | "Red Envelopes"

There is a woman who has been suspended in a cramped glass pill in the sky for a year. She has never quite gotten used to it, but she at least knows what is going on outside. Sort of. They send her letters—no words, mind you, only pictures. She simply falls asleep, and then it ends up in her hands: a crisp red envelope, with forty-two glossy 9x12 photographs taken below the clouds. She does not know how or why they end up with her. She probably never will. The photographs have no context except that which she gives to them, so they can mean anything she wants them to. She makes stories out of them so she doesn’t go crazy.

There is also a wizard who retired and became a toymaker. One day, it showed up on his doorstep. There had been no knock on the door, no horseman—nothing. Only the mail. It was an anonymous order for a matched set of wooden dragon figurines, painstakingly inked onto snowy paper and sealed inside of a crisp red envelope. He began work on them immediately and had them sanded and painted by midnight, but found them gone the next morning. Peculiar. He made more. Gone. He repeated this forty-two times and that is how the oakenwyrm race was created.

There is also a starving musician who busks in a portside town in Scotland. One day, he looked in his guitar case and it was there—a red envelope, full of sheet music. He selected a page at random and scanned it. He felt as if he had known the song his whole life, and laid his fingers across the strings with virtuoso. A crowd gathered to watch him play. He played another song, and another, yet another. He did this forty-two times and now he isn’t starving anymore.

There is also a writer, struggling to complete her novel. One day, when opening her mail box, she found it amongst the usual junk mail and nerdy magazines—a crisp red envelope with no stamp or address. Its contents felt thick and heavy. She took it back up to her apartment, and then opened it. It was a manuscript. Her manuscript, only…finished. She peeked at the middle. It was all in her writing style. It had that line of dialogue she had been planning but hadn’t written down anywhere. She looked at the end. It was the sentence she had envisioned. In forty-two days she finished transcribing it onto her computer, and that is why she isn’t struggling to write her second novel.

Finally, there is a postman in red, who has a bag of red envelopes. He’s not from around here. He’s not from around anywhere. He has deliveries to make—deliveries to the people who need him most, even if they don’t know it.

Perhaps you are one of them.

Perhaps he has already visited you.

Perhaps it will change your life very soon