The Mail Woman
Outfit swapping during the annual Christmas bash
Mike woke up to the smell of rotting pizza. A sheet of cold air hung above his body and crept through an opening in his shirt. He noticed two buttons were undone. Fingering the shirt, he noticed that it didn’t feel right. It was scratchy and formal. But there were more pressing concerns. For example: why was he scrunched up in a ball and surrounded by walls of shiny porcelain. Where was he?
He flipped himself over onto his belly with pained effort, scratching his nose on a metal drain.
“Bathtub,” he mumbled. “In my bathroom, within my apartment. That’s where I am.”
There was no time to wonder why only time to try and figure out how to get up and flip the light switch. He sat up in the tub, touched some calcified substance on the corners of his mouth, and heard a chain sliding across the bottom of the tub. He ran his hands down his pant legs and noticed weird creases like they were new. The shoes on his feet were slick, like leather, and heavy. He owned nothing as new and well-laundered as these clothes.
After a few minutes, Mike appeared before the mirror over the sink, and, flipping the light switch, saw a mailman looking back at him. A real mail carrier.
“Am I a mailman?” he asked the mirror.
Not possible. His memory slowly migrated to the front of his brain and he knew his job had nothing to do with mail. Did he even have a job? There was a blue kerchief around his neck. A small patch sat above the breast pocket of the shirt that read: USPS. He was wearing a full mail carrier’s uniform, but why? And why was it so damn tight?
The pants hugged his waist too greedily, and the bottoms flared out, almost like true bell bottoms. The shoes were also too small. It felt, looked, to his amazement, like a female’s outfit. There was some space between his chest and the shirt, like two globes of flesh should be sitting there, filling it in.
“I woke up in my tub wearing a mail woman’s uniform. What the Hell happened last night?” He massaged the bridge of his nose and wondered.
At any rate, he figured he should return the outfit to the post office downtown. At least it was only a few blocks away. He peeked out the window above the toilet and noticed the sun was at the top of the sky. That meant it was about noon, and the mail should be coming any moment. Mike decided to wait for the mail and give the uniform to whoever showed up. He walked out into the dark apartment and, stepping over pizza boxes and half-empty cups, made his way to the bedroom to change. The lighted balsam fir tree in the corner of the living room reminded him that the mayhem last night was the annual Richardson Christmas bash. It was possible, he silently asserted, that the party was the reason for all this. How? He supposed it didn’t matter as long as he could rectify it.
He heard the puttering truck outside. Throwing on a hoodie and sweats in haste, Mike ran to the front door. Outside, the path to the street was covered in a clear sheet of ice. Running across it, he slipped and slid on his back to the curb. A thin brunette in her mid-to-late twenties walked up to the dazed body on the ground and offered a hand. She was wearing a maroon dress shirt and green slacks with wreaths on them; Mike’s prized Christmas bash outfit.
“How do you — why?” Mike tried to ask.
“Don’t bother,” she said. “If you give me my uniform, I’ll go into your place and change real quick, then be back to work, and we can erase this from our minds. Oh, and here’s your mail.”
She handed him a stack of envelopes and flyers. He took them and gave her the clothes, folded neatly, with the shoes sitting on top.
