ome walk by night, some fly by day. Pritchard delivers the mail.

He woke up that morning feeling less a hero than a man who dropped the jar every time he attempted to buy dill pickles. “Too damn tangy,” he muttered while rubbing out his last cigarette for the next quarter of an hour.

“Too goddamn tangy,” he sobbed into his day’s last apricot nectar.

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, but seldom did they fall into clumps of Pritchard. “I like any combination of cheese and bacon known to man,” he offered to an uncaring god while poking his ever-ballooning belly.

Heroes come few and far between. In Salt Lake City, they come the far betweeniest.

The morning mist scurried out to the pockets amid the hills. In his dewy white mail truck he saw the gaping maw of eternity preparing to crunch his testicles into a fine dust. “Another day, another doughnut,” he sobbed into his tattered copy of Maxim.

His appraisal of “How to Score with the Hotties” remains pending while he tabulates the final results.

Pritchard thinks hard of the obstacles. The drooling, bellowing hounds—the middle-aged sirens, draped in sheer negligées and armed with the treacherous beckoning of a single finger. He knew nothing of this. “Once I seen this guy throw about six oranges at a cat,” he said, “It was nuts.”

The packages of mail come like a vicious, brown potato—lumpy and wanting.

He wipes perspiration and genuflects the god of want. The god forcing work and sobriety. The god envisioned in the lonely square of nothing destined for a sniveling minority of RED ones.

Pritchard danced very little but he felt a bounce to his boots as he pressed the hard, unrelenting release of the gas pedal on his government-owned-and-operated vehicle. “This piece is about as condescending as ‘About Schmidt’ with half the revenue.” He nodded off into the decadent fog of smoldering rubber as all three-and-a-half cylinders of mail truck went to town on a press package.

Who knows what actually burnt the tattered hole of the newest Penguin Peauxlice press release. Who cares that it rhymed and included an ensemble of refrigerator magnets with which one could wax poetic while their Yoo-Hoo cooled.

He obliterated the flat, obvious package stuck beneath the rear wheel of his ride. It squealed like a cat in orgasm. Some plastic hit Bill in the face.

Pritchard looked upon his broken vow to the people of this nation to deliver their mail through rain and sleet and what-not.

Luckily, he kept a clever photocopy with “WE CARE” emblazoned on it to protect his postal ass. A postal ass-most-hairy.

What we care about is that the United States Postal Service dares to care, and caring is daring if you’re doing the sharing and this is the lamest Herring you’ve read in a year-ing.

When the burnt-haze rubber lifted on the dismal hulk of Pritchard passed out in a pile of “neighbor-savers.”

With his dying breath, he robbed the neighborhood of 20 percent off a carpet shampoo, but he managed to Scotch-tape a photocopy of love to our package.

Our package is proud.
craig@red-mag.com