WHEN THE MAILBOXES STARTED appearing all over town—the ones in which you could send letters to your dead that they’d be able to receive and read—we all regarded it as something dangerous. Those who had dabbled in ouija boards and harmless playful witchcraft in childhood were somewhat less concerned while others saw the new magical objects as being placed there by the devil. First of all, none of us knew where they came from. But the label slapped across each of them was clear.

“Letters for your dead?”

“Some kind of scam surely.”

This was the most widely held opinion for a while, that it was just a way to collect people’s personal information, closest relationships, and darkest secrets for hacking, blackmailing, identity theft, and a myriad of nefarious purposes.

“Well,” the bold adventurous ones in every friend group or family said, “what if it’s real?”

“Do the dead write back to you?”

“And even if they do—then what?”

These were questions with no answers as the mailboxes had no website or QR code linking to a FAQ page. For something so futuristic, it was handled in a decidedly old school analog fashion. Papers, envelopes, stamps—a nostalgic ode to the past.

“Maybe that’s all it is. Some kind of performance art. A statement piece. Get people to slow down and mail handwritten letters again.”

“Next thing you know, there will be telephone booths popping up everywhere. Line up here to call and talk to your dead!”

“Like the Japanese wind phones?”

“No, ones where the dead talk back.”

Our hearts ached at the thought of that. But some people insisted they’d refuse that option, too. The dead are meant to rest. Not to be disturbed with phone calls and correspondence.

“I don’t want to talk to ghosts. I don’t care who it is or how much I loved them.”

“The last thing I want when I’m dead is to read or listen to people ramble on about their day. Fuck that.”

Many of us secretly kept our eyes open for glass kiosks with quaint corded telephones. A conversation felt like a much more instant gratification and reliable situation than writing and sending a letter to god knows where while unable to be certain that any return mail is from your ghosts.

What if we were to trust and fill each mailbox to the brim with our love letters until they overflowed into the streets? Only for all the letters to then remain there. Never sent. Our hopes up for nothing. Vulnerable wounds reopened. It would be like losing our dead all over again.

Our group of friends developed a morbid curiosity about what the letters might say. We lived in a small town where nothing much ever happened. The most dramatic thing in ages had been a dead body in the woods almost a decade ago. But it had turned out that neither the victim nor the killer were from here and the murder happened in another state. They’d just transported and dumped the corpse here. So the guilty party was extradited for their trial and the body returned home elsewhere for a proper burial. The mysterious mailboxes were no dead body, sure, but it was about as close as we were going to get.

“It’s a federal crime to bust open a mailbox.”

“Yeah but these have nothing to do with the government. They’re as clueless about them as we are.”

“Unless that’s what they want us to think,” the conspiracy theorist among us said.

“Whatever. I want to see what people wrote.”

We waited until night. The good thing about quiet towns is they fall asleep early. Some of the letters were angry, others were guilt ridden confessions, a few spoke of unexpressed longing, but most were—as expected—about missing people they’d loved and lost. There were envelopes of nearly every color, like a rainbow of yearning and regret.

When we woke up in the morning, we were certain we’d be discovered and punished for our transgression. But no one came pounding our doors down. The mailbox looked untouched. People continued to slide letters into the slot, looking around as they tried to do it unseen. Considering how many letters we found in there, the town was still acting embarrassed like they’d never do it. Everyone said things in passing like they understand why someone might, but that it’s not for them personally.

It was a few more months before the town began to accept that no replies were reaching them. Not in their individual home mailboxes nor in any new strange communal ones. The mysterious mailboxes held at this point thousands of unsent letters. As was inevitable with the inexorable passage of time, the mailboxes began to blend into their surroundings. The mystery remained unsolved and the letters unanswered but we no longer wondered aloud if this would ever change.

Then one afternoon, after a week of heavy rain, everyone emerged into the sunshine and blue sky to find every last mailbox gone and replaced by telephone booths. There was no label anywhere about using them to call our dead. But we knew.

Today marks one year since the mailboxes showed up. My friends and I visit one of the phone booths together for the first time. We crowd around it, immobile and transfixed. We wait for someone to go first. I volunteer.

I walk inside and my hand shakes as I pick up the receiver. I realize I don’t know what to dial but I don’t need to. I listen and hear ringing.

It feels like the phone will ring forever and when it finally stops, so does my heartbeat. “Hello?”

My dead sister’s voice on the other end says, “You’re such a cynic. I didn’t think you would go for this.”

I breathe, fast and shallow, in response.

“I knew you wouldn’t mail a letter,” she says. “You’re too lazy.” Her laugh jolts through me like an electric shock. “But I was hoping you’d call.” •




Anna Vangala Jones is the author of the short story collection Turmeric & Sugar (Thirty West, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Wigleaf, HAD, Berkeley Fiction Review, Craft Literary, and AAWW’s The Margins, among others. Her stories have been selected for Longform Fiction’s Best of 2018, the Wigleaf Top 50 longlist, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other award anthologies.

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