She was half-asleep and listening solemnly to Saturday Nite Special by the Runaways when her therapist called her and she let it run right to voicemail. She despised her therapist, for she was blonde and full and tan and beautiful and didn't dredge around the house, and was getting married in two Mays to a medical student who’d deliver babies someday. While Sandy, cocooned in her rustled, dusty queen bed in her only rosy polka-dotted Victoria’s Secret bra from 7th grade that still fit, only wanted to light a cigarette and go to the mall (when the single store that was kind to her meager savings was Goodwill). 

When a banging knock approached her door, she stomped out of bed, cradling the raspy, low voice of Joan Jett in her arms. She]

 hadn’t bothered to press pause, so the deep sounds of 1977 pulsed through the house’s wooden veins like pesky termites. 

She flung open the door, mumbling under her breath, her eyes violently bloodshot and these small kisses paid from summer angels bickering for a free space on her chin and nose, to reveal a tiny man with almond eyes and a close-shaved buzz cut. The fine lines encircling his small, sore lips suggested he was not young, suggested he was burnt and pulled apart into tiny, torn bits. Nevertheless, she glared at him, forgetting she was only donned in a girlish bra and beaten-up hand-me-down BKE blue jeans whose fraying, flared ends were rapidly unraveling, and the small brass buttons engraved with two little B's adhering to the flap pockets growing threadbare. 

His face grew a soft pink, though Sandy’s did not--it remained hard, steadily unmoving from the loathing cut of her eyes. “Well? Do you have my mail?” She asked, and he answered without opening his mouth, curtly nodding his head. This angered Sandy in an uncomfortable, broiling way that she couldn’t explain. Had his mother not beat some right manners into him?

Solidified with a sure blanket of quietude, he pulled out a thin stack of envelopes addressed to Samantha F. Jones-Preed, water bills and electricity notices from Washington, DC, the city whose favorite pastime was confiscating her money as if it were a child’s plaything. He handed it to her, which followed with her frowning at him and the couple wide envelopes, insisting: “I really don’t think that I need to pay this stuff. Can you please send it back to whoever put it here?” She extended her arm to dangle her new assets, grinning, expecting him to gladly grab the stack and tuck it into his coat pocket. She winked to ensure the deal, smiling and showing each one of her teeth. They’d better look good: she’d spent 5,000 dollars to make them pearly and straight, organized into single-file lines. 

The mailman, flustered and bothered, shook his head in disapproval. She wrung out her damp hands, the early June sun bathing her warm, askew bob in a buttery, hot sphere of light. “You don’t have to tell nobody! They’ll never know.” She called after him as he hobbled weakly down the short, gravelly steps of her townhouse. The song had switched swiftly from Saturday Nite Special to Play That Song Again by Joan Jett and The Blackhearts. Sandy didn’t care about the Blackhearts part, she had no idea who they even were: but she loved Joan. She thought she was absolutely beautiful, with her spiky shag hair, daunting raven’s eye, and defined, porcelain face. She’d wished she and Cherie Currie had been in love--but knew they hadn’t. 

Upon coming to the very true conclusion her mailman paid her ignorance, a bubbling anger arose in her chest, fast and sweaty like the hooves of a galloping racehorse. She couldn’t place a finger on why he angered her so badly--but he did.

“Oh, be like that!” She huffed, allowing her voice to rise over the vibrant clamor of music, and the old man halted. “B*tch! Take them back.” She screeched, fuming from her chest and 

Ever slowly, he turned to face Sandy. The indents of time that framed  his eyes crinkled as if they were crisp grocery paper bags. Sandy crossed her skinny arms that had been compared to tree limbs in second grade. She waited patiently for his comeback, leaning back on her doorstep, which she had paid for, which she had sobbed unpon, which she had blown crystal bubbles that reflected her bambi eyes on their sheeny surface, and on which he had disrespected her. Say something!!!!

He raised his scruffy salt-and-pepper brows, and to Sandy’s dismay, he grinned. His teeth resembled small bits of corn shaved from the cob, rounded and pale yellow. 

“Young lady, these are your bills. If you don’t pay them for long enough, that means jail time, and you won't last a goddamn day in there. Believe me!” He guffawed a hoarse laugh, his aged voice croaky and grating. 

Sandy Jones-Preed stood her ground as she narrowed her large, full eyes. “You don’t know anything about me, mister.” She spat, jabbing a painted fingernail to his chest, his thin blue button-down seeping with the sour stench of summertime. “You’re just a f*cking mailman.”

“That may be correct.” The sheer ghost of a smile on his lips was obvious. 

Sandy stood. She thought. She ruffled her thick bangs. She crossed her speckled arms which had recently been baked into a warm burnt umber, uncrossed them and hung them by her sides like meat in a butchery. 

She observed the old man painstakingly--he had a pointed angle of a chin, sorely out-turned ears, chafed, parring white lips, and stray silver hairs that peeked shyly from an undone, polished button. His buttons were the single thing prim about him. 

“Will you drive me to the mall?” 

* * *

Sandy reached into her knockoff Chanel to retrieve a box of her sister’s cigarettes, alone in the dimmed dankness of  the elderly mailman’s white truck. She fumbled with her rosy lighter, the flame timidly emerging as she click, click, clicked, frustrated. Once she stuck the Marlboro between her bare lips, she held up the striking flame which illuminated the intimate space almost lovingly, like a Christmastime fireplace, and lit the cigarette ablaze. Circles of glowing, orange light bounced on her cheekbones and rounded nose, dangling bits of her syrupy pin-straight tresses threatening to catch the flame. 

She was surrounded, compressed by hoards and big boxes of yellowing envelopes. She could only imagine what these letters would do to mettle in the lives of thousands of tiny people, like little dolls milling around in a wooden-block world, rejections and bills and sympathy cards. 

As she drew in the cold, silver smoke, the mailman barked from his driver’s seat. “Stop smoking in my van!!” 

“Jesus! Ok!” She hollered as the stale vapor arose somewhere inside of her, trapped by her lungs. It was as if she had swallowed a bothersome, wispy sliver of the earth in a haze form--rough and scratchy on the confined space that was her throat. 

The truck grumbled to a stop, its motor as old as the hunched-over man and as disappointing of a failure as Sandy Jones-Preed. 

Sandy sprung from her nest, upsetting a crate brimming with stamped and addressed items. She kept her gallop, shrieking. “Thank you so much!” She exclaimed, frolicking through the revolving doors paned with plexiglass and practically cartwheeled into the Macy’s lobby, puffing out a snaking swirl of smog as she trudged down the perfume aisle in her loose flare jeans, the worn hand-me-down denim flapping with each of her steps, the grumpy mailman following at her heels. 

 She violently yanked and pressed at the velveteen atomizer on a botanical Miss Dior, the girly, frilly scent marinating with the husk of her cigarette exhaust. The two smelled terrible as a combination, but she snuck the squared glass jar into her purse nevertheless. After selecting a roll on Chanel #4, she waltzed into the makeup section, testing each vial of peachy foundation and tube of new plumping Lancǒme lipgloss, stuffing Sour Black Cherry into her jeans’ embellished back pocket. She picked tiny things like Maybelline Ultra-Volume mascara, a real Marc Jaobs pearl necklace, all cream and glimmering (what if a mermaid had touched those beauties??), the prettiest Valentino lipstick, creating a crimson sheen to her lips as if she’d bitten into a spring cherry. It all went straight into her champagne Chanel handbag without twice a thought from Sandy Jones-Preed.

The short mailman watched her, his hands hidden by the baggy pockets of his cargos, but she was heedful. She’d been prepared with many years of practice, after all. He watched as she giggled with the dark-haired woman behind Covergirl’s makeup counter, gushing about the latest issue of Seventeen or those fluffy, ivory teacup poodles. Nearly fondly he observed that she befriended everyone in sight--the daunting cashier, the prying salesgirl, a fellow shopper who couldn’t choose between a daring scarlett or a soft, fertile peony. The slight gap separating her two front-teeth, her golden studded belly ring that caught the sunlight gusting through a large window as she rode the huffing escalator--it reminded him of his own granddaughter, who’d been young and plump with potential to love and nourish. He couldn’t remember how many years had gone, but she’d perished quietly in the bathtub she’d bathed in as a little girl. Her head had gone under after her fresh-faced heart gave in, and her body limp and lifeless was lifted steadily from its tragic porcelain casket as her mother cried crocodile tears in the corner. 

She had been perfect at hiding the blue-and-white pills in padded clutches, bedside tables of cypress, plastic bags nudged in a forgotten drawer. She was so good it was as if it’d never been real.

Sandy was out of place in the humongous Tiffany and Co, in a ratty hot-pink tube top lined in lace without any bra, and trashy coral Converse decorated in mistakes of purple Sharpie. The luster of each gleaming gem was blinding to her, lost in a dreamland fit for Princess Diana and her dashing, tight charcoal dress. She unclipped a diamond necklace when the sapphire-eyed clerk turned to examine a pair of emerald earrings. She swiped a sterling silver charm bracelet from Pandora, a musky,  adult Dolce & Gabbana perfume. The rich scent of a Russian queen would cling to her uneven skin, tricking the Earth into believing she’d been drenched in lucious inheritance.

Once Sandy Jones-Preed was finally done in the posh Dior, her wide pocketbook bursting and crying for help, she weaved her way through the tiled hallways and back into the Macy’s, where she generously greeted the beautiful salesgirl, judgy clerk and indecisive shopper with that strange, surprising warmth she had about her. 

She crossed the big old machines that never caught her, and she wasn’t worried that they would.

But this time, they did. This time, they shrieked with redhot envy, betrayal, like her mother once did, and Sandy began to release scream so foul you’d hear it sweet and clear from the Oval Office. She tried to run, but burly arms snatched her back as if she were a poorly sewn ragdoll. She roared until her throat was raw poultry as the men in indigo suits pressed with rainbow patches, embroidered with letters that she could not read--as they sorted through her delicious new perfumes and glittering jewels, her creamy designer lipsticks and fine sugar gloss and the Marc Jacobs string of pearls. The mailman, his back precariously like that of a black cat’s, watched knowingly. And he left, and he climbed into his white-and-royal blue truck filled with envelopes Sandy had sat among and began to prod the engine. It squalled, but Sandy was louder. Her caterwauls, tearful and frantic and wailing, resembled the excessive bawls of his late wonder who would never come back. The old man thrust his forehead into the chilled leather of his steering wheel. He wept like a child.