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Home at Last
Down in the Dirt (v123) (the May/June 2014 Issue)




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I Pull the Srings

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the Beaten Path
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Jan. - June 2014
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Need to Know Basis
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Chain Letter

Jon Brunette

    When the package arrived, I couldn’t possibly have realized how much it would change my life. It wasn’t like I had expected anything to come, either; in fact, I rarely checked the mail anymore, and I never really cared about the letters that I’d get anyway. I’d only go out to the mailbox so that I could drink, because my wife didn’t allow me to drink inside the house anymore. I never expected anything except bills and those anonymous fliers that everyone got. Still, it came just the same, and I did what I should have done, and, then, I mailed it back out in the same manner that it had been mailed to me.
    I had been arguing with my wife for quite a few months. We rarely spoke anymore except to yell at each other. I drove her insane; she drove me to drink. Yet, we still felt jealous around each other. I hated her; she hated me. And, yet, we understood each other—we would never leave each other because neither she nor I could stand to see the other one with someone else. Naturally, I had to fix the problem. And the package that came mailed to me anonymously did fix the problem. Then, I mailed the package back out to someone else in the same manner that it had come to me.
    After too many fights with her, I pointed a small caliber pistol at her head, told her to shut her mouth, or I would pull the trigger. She would die, and I could finally live with the girl who bagged my groceries at the local supermarket. I had no interest in her, and, yet, my wife thought that I did. And I wanted her to think so, too, because it would make her easier to kill.
    I didn’t want to quit drinking, so I shot her, after I had aimed the gun at her like a small boy might shoot a laser pistol. She slumped forward like she had gotten stomach cramps, and, finally, dropped down onto the floor. Naturally, I had to dispose of her body. Before I did so, though, I had to dispose of the pistol that had killed her. So, I did what the first owner had done.
    I rubbed my prints off it, put it inside a small box, and mailed it out just as anonymously. I realized that the first owner had put a fake address in the upper left-hand corner, gotten out of the telephone book, killed his wife, which I also had to assume, and, then, had mailed it back out to some other address in the book, which happened to be mine. I did the same thing, and found two numbers that I shouldn’t have been able to recognize later, and brought the box to the post office to mail. The mailman didn’t require ID, so, naturally, I figured I’d be safe. That was how it came to be in my possession in the first place, and, so, I simply mailed it back out to someone else.
    Only, I did one thing the previous owner didn’t do: I put a letter around the barrel filled with newspaper clippings to be found by the recipient. It read, “Kill your wife. Then, mail this back out to someone else in the same manner. Otherwise, you will have a lifetime filled with bad luck,” which would have been true in my case.
    Three weeks later, I reread the letter that I had put together, not as a copy (I had made no copies), but the original; I reread the letter out of the Star Tribune, exactly as I had left it tied around the barrel. Apparently, the new owner had taken my advice: he did shoot his wife as my letter had told him to do. Only he had gotten caught. Apparently, he had mailed the .22 caliber out to an address where a cop lived. He’d left the same note tied around the barrel that I had left; only, he had also told the cop how the letter worked, including the gun, and why it could work as it should, but the real surprise had been that he had written his real address on the upper left-hand corner before he’d mailed it back out. Some people really were too stupid to live!
    At least, I was not.



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