Mail-Order Muse

A Story by ZackOfBridge

3-5 Business Days

My muse came in the mail today.
I had been waiting for a week. Not having a job, due to a devotion to writing and creativity, I sat on the apartment patio in wait of my muse. I sat for hours smelling my neighbor’s cigarettes on the air and hearing the brand new child of his screaming from somewhere in the apartment. It was truly not an ideal wait, but the mail-order muse may put the screaming infant and tobacco scented afternoons to use in a story, possibly even a novel depending on the power of this muse. Everyday the muse did not arrive, I walked to the mailman, a turkey necked man with a white angular mustache, and questioned his competency as a man of the nation’s post.
         "Where is the package Frank? Its been a week now, where is it being sent from, f*****g pluto?”
   "I don’t know sir, I am not the one who ordered it. You can track your packages now, online, you know."
   "You don’t think I knew that Frank? I think you’re hiding it in that camel back of a stomach you’ve got there. Is the post-office on Yelp, because I’ve got some s**t to yelp at you pall."
   "F**k off," he said and I did. I fucked right off back into the apartment to wait until the next day. I fucked right off to my desk where my typewriter sat in its mechanical wait. I looked at it, slid fingertips on the surface of the keys and watched the punchers dance their thin can-can kicks. Those punchers would slap the paper when the muse came. Stories would pour and pour and the paper would be so saturated in prose that it would drip from the dampness and I would wring it out and drink the concentrate. When the Muse came.
   Well, the little federal minion, postman Frank did come through the next day. He walked with straight legs and that blue-sash full of bills and other garbage. I was waiting, tapping the mail key on the box. He filled every box before he came to mine, #12. He looked once at me, pushing his glasses up with his finger, “You happy?"
          “Very, Frankie. I always thought you were alright.” I said as I penetrated the lock with my key. I took the package, it fit in my hand, and returned to my apartment and to my desk where the typewriter sat in its patient wait, like a woman unclothed but not uncovered and spread upon a love nest. I opened the blinds and the sky, the wide blue virgin that she is peeped from the window and she blew her whispers to me from the open window. I slashed into the tape of the box with a pen and opened its cardboard flaps. The box was empty, contained nothing at all.
      I cursed loud. Wailed like the fresh baby behind the walls of my apartment. We competed in shrieks, mine more vulgar and his more confused. It was just even. With the pen still in hand, I thrashed at a piece of paper. Words came from the thrashing, lines and lines of words. They came not from me, but they did not stop. The pen continued to scrape its fall to the bottom of the page until a blank was presented. I could not stop, it was though a tense hand pushed the pen down like a hound’s nose to a warm piss puddle. It kept it there as if to say, “Why do you do this! Do you see what you have done! Are you ever going to learn!” This lasted for hours as a most manic form of productivity.