#botober2023

The envelope is screaming at you, all bright and happy colors. You’ve never held one of these in your own hands, you only saw pictures of them on the internet. You’d kind of thought those images had to have been manipulated, that the colors couldn’t possibly be that. It’s a non-serif font. Not for the first time, you wonder if death just stops being sad in the future.

People started getting mail from the future a year or so ago. Nobody believed them at first of course, and many people still don’t. You were on the fence until today. A lot of it looked real, but you knew how well people can fake things these days, too. Right now, the postman is still in your living room, one foot on your floor, the other foot in his portal, a mesmerizing swirl of nothingness, of a hole in the world, that just opened up in your home for him to deliver your mail. It’s only ever this company. People have figured out since that they just have a monopoly on time-travel mail, this funeral home. The story is that so many people couldn’t afford their loved ones’ funeral costs that, instead of making funerals cheaper, this future conglomerate of funeral homes invested in time-travel technology to send messages to the past. Now people know, if their loved ones want them to, when those loved ones will die, and they can start saving up. Inside the envelope is the dying person’s name, their time of death, their ideal funeral date, and an estimate for how much it will cost.

That’s the theory.

“What,” you croak, the open envelope quaking in your hands. “Wait. What does this mean?”

The postman that only half exists in your living room and half exists several decades in the future, gives you the look of a minimum wage employee who has a lot of other stops yet to make today. You can see something you assume to be an electric cigarette or something similar in one of his hands, the one that’s already back through the portal. You really hate to keep him. “Kinda what it says in the letter,” he says.

“But,” you say. “But this doesn’t make sense, she’s already—”

“Listen,” says the postman. “I’m just the postman.”

He steps through, and with a loud pop, the portal closes behind him, leaving you alone in your home with the letter as the only proof any of this happened.

You call your brother. He’s the only one out of the three of you who still lives in your hometown. “Hey, what’s up?” he says. Does that mean only you got the envelope? Does it mean a portal opened in his mailbox instead while he’s at work, and he hasn’t gotten to check it yet?

“Hey,” you say back. “Have you been to mom’s grave recently?”

He makes a pensive noise. “Not super recently, why?”

“Can you go today?” Dread seeps like tar into your lungs. “I need to know she’s still in there.”

*

Custom Botober Day 2: Disrespecting the Ancient Elder Tea

"Yeah, mom? Just checking, tea doesn't go bad right? Didn't have lipton so I tried steeping some of Granma's old stuff instead."

Drawing again no matter how scrungly these will look. I need to stretch my art muscles.

Picked botober prompt lists again.

1. Bread sky.