From Hell to Breakfast by Meghan Tifft

Author:Meghan Tifft
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Unnamed Press
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

The Hat

Dracula wonders if he should be making himself scarce. If perhaps he should have planned a little camping trip. Make like a tree in the polluted wood, as the saying goes.

Somebody will surely come looking for him. Should he tell Lucinda? Should he present her with a scheme for meeting? He doesn’t think she’ll go for it. He doesn’t think they’d last on the lam.

If somebody came looking for him, who would it be? A liability lawyer from UPS? A law officer? Charges, he knows, would have to be filed. UPS, he knows, would have to oblige. Information he falsified would be divulged. Then indictments and arraignments, whatever that means. That’s about as far as his television expertise takes him. He has begun to watch the mail very carefully. And the door.

Tonight, in recompense for his vigil, he found a letter already stashed in the slot. He looked down the breezeway for a mailman who was surely long gone. It was 6:00 P.M. The last mailman Dracula had seen was in late fall, smiling inside a thick strap of beard when he delivered the mail at 4:45. Lucinda hated how dark it got this time of year. She hated how cold and closed in it was. Dracula felt a little bruised by this. Winter should mean more time with him.

Dracula brought the letter in. As always is the case, it is addressed to Lucinda. In big block script. It’s been idling beside his foot on the coffee table while Dracula watches TV. Now he picks it up. Inside, signed in the gruel of Richard’s hand, is her final paycheck. It seems a little late for such farewell reparations, even by Dracula’s sense of timing. He still wonders why she quit.

For a while, Dracula sits folding. The table jams his legs apart as he leans into the abstraction of his thoughts. He likes to fold mail. He doesn’t know why, but the tight creases satisfy him, the breaking fibers under his thumb, the planes and pleats bowing to his brute suggestion. He got a calendar for his birthday once—every day a new origami shape. There was a pig, a balloon, a sailboat. Why does he remember? The paper was colored variously and coated with a satin sheen. There was a smell too, a clean, distant plume of it, loose light on morning horizons. Dracula doesn’t really know loose light on morning horizons, but the idea slips in nicely like some well-worn trespass, something else learned from television, another false and guilty refuge in the unknown and inapproachable. At times like this, Dracula wonders where his thoughts come from. He is folding without pause, steady and insistent. All this hit and miss. Lucinda isn’t here again. He supposes it’s possible that he can wait like this forever, pulling tight the rigging of his remaining days in some dumb, perishing act. Somehow, folding takes him way out past his own thinking. Always to that slow, oiled horizon, those watery mirages of dread and mystification.

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