About A Letter

            As Jesse walked back inside from checking his mail, he leafed through it to see if anything was actually not related to bills. “Bill, bill, bill, Bill-wait, what?” Jesse stopped right before entering his front door, staring at a letter addressed to someone named Bill Parsons. Not ‘William’, as most Bills are called when letters are addressed to them, but ‘Bill’. He checked the address to see if the mailman had made an error there. No, whoever had sent this thought that Bill lived in Jesse’s house.

            He had always heard of this happening to other people before, but it had never actually happened to him. Jesse realized that he was putting more importance into the event than was called for, and finally asked himself the important question: Should I open it? There was no way of knowing where this ‘Bill Parsons’ actually was, since even the person trying to contact him didn’t know, apparently. Was it right to open people’s mail, though? Didn’t that violate some rule of privacy, or something? At the same time, it was addressed to his house, and wasn’t he entitled to read whatever mail came his way? The government reads my mail all the time, shit. I shouldn’t be stressing much about this, they probably read his mail, too, Jesse concluded. Reaching for letter opener, he asked himself (as he did every time he reached for the letter opener) why letter openers looked so much more deadly than was necessary. Every letter opener he had ever seen looked like an unusually ornate knife. Did people in other houses stab their letters until they opened? Did people do that in the past? People in the past did some strange things, he knew, like making kids work in factories, or wear wizard-y hats to spook people into thinking they were wizard-y people. But then, Jesse knew a kid like that down the street, and this was present day, wasn’t it? He supposed that people did weird things regardless of the time period in which they lived, sighed, and tried to stab the letter open, just for the hell of it.

            It didn’t work. Jesse soon figured out that the letter opener just wasn’t sharp enough to actually stab through an envelope without a lot of force, which would rip the paper inside. He switched back to using the letter opener as he assumed normal people did, and the envelope proved much easier to open.  He was somewhat surprised when he took the paper out to read it, finding this:

            “You are not Bill Parsons. Shame on you for opening his letter. Who are you to stick your nose into other people’s private matters like this? The fact that you have even read this far appalls me. Good day.”

            “What an odd thing to send. Who sends a letter to someone addressed to the wrong place, simply to tell the person living there that they aren’t the person to whom the letter is addressed?” Jesse said to himself. Out of habit, he flipped the paper over to make a paper airplane out of it. He found more writing on the back, which increased his surprise even further.

            The back said “Ah, good old Bill, always reading the backs of letters. How I love the way you always do that. It never made any sense to me, but it keeps other people from reading what I write to you. This way, I know that only you will read this. Now I may continue.

            How are your kids? Do you have any kids yet? I know last year you mentioned trying to make some, but I don’t know if you ever got around to that, and I was just curious. Cloning is not something one usually just takes up on a whim, you know. It isn’t an easy task, and if you actually managed to accomplish that feat, I would be very interested in knowing. I gave up years ago, as you know. My wife never really recovered from the experience. She hasn’t looked at me the same since then. Sox still loves me, but she’s a dog. Dogs just love things, you know. That’s why I have one. I give her bacon a few times a week, and she thinks it is the most glorious happenstance in the world. Sometimes I long for such simple wishes. What if our lives were so simple as to be made infinitely better by the addition of a few bacon strips? It could be paradise; it could be hell, Bill. Who’s to say? I’m thinking about a new experiment, one that includes bacon of some variety or other. That is the only detail I have at the moment, I was hoping you could fill in some holes for me. If you could, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you,

Stevenathon”

            After careful consideration, Jesse thought the entire letter was nonsense, and made himself a bacon sandwich as he threw the letter away.