Roald Amundsen was seeing strange things in the middle of Alaska. A portrait of himself inside a school house. The Inuit men who accompanied him were seasoned, but they had never seen a man quite this hysterical. Amundsen’s glasses fell off of his face; the shake of his madness had left it bare. Suddenly the young Roald disappeared and before the older, non -photocopied and wrinkled Roald was seeing a postman. There were bags and bags of letters around him, none of which were addressed to anywhere in Alaska, or even addressed at all. A polar bear was floating along, minding his damn business when he inexplicably found himself in Alaska. In the distance he could see a small school house. Out of the double doors, children rushed out, shouting nonsense, hysterical. With all of their shiny and pressed uniforms, the bear never had been self-conscious before, but now he felt bare. Alongside the polar bear, a tall slender man with a furry mess under his lip and the palest blue uniform had slipped beside him and had been standing there for quite sometime, the bear noticed him finally and deduced that he must be, of some sort, a postman. The polar bear noticed that there were no letters in the postman’s bag but instead a high caliber rifle, and the bear realized all the terrible things that would happen soon, and he thought “Oh God no, if you have a conscience at all…” In a local bar, there were men laughing and aloof to all of the peculiar happenings in Alaska. This was a simple town, up until after the end of World War One; they didn’t even have a school house. The men were sharing stories about boats they had been on and women that had rejected them, roaring in a manner hysterical. Joe Wright had unfortunately been experimenting with salvia and decided that it was maybe a good day to be completely bare. As he was thrown out of the establishment, he could see at the end of the town’s border, a postman. He thought “How odd, this man is not smiling, grinning, frowning, scrunching his face, or showing any expression at all.” On a boat off the coast, a young boy thought about the adventures that he could be having, if only his parents would dock and explore Alaska. He missed his friends, well he didn’t miss them, they were pricks, but he did miss the cigars that he would smoke behind the school house. The boy felt a cold ache creeping up his legs, it was not fear, it was not death, but a frenzied swarm of something he could not describe but drove him out of his quarters, hysterical. The boy was only preoccupied by one thought, “I am unclean.”, so he stripped himself, skin and all, bare. As he cried in agony, he passed out finally from the pain, he awoke for a few moments, he forgot his pain for only a second merely from the shock of what he saw in front of him, the most peculiar thing, a postman. The boy died without cigars, without a sense of providence, he died with nothing to comfort him at all. Inside of their home, an Inuit woman was crocheting her husband of forty years a blanket for his trips into the tundra plains of Alaska. The children of their children stopped byon their way from the school house. The thought of her cookies made the children’s eyes brighter than the stars in the Alaskan sky, they were inconsolably hysterical. Their grandmother preoccupied with thoughts of her husband’s safety, did not notice the children come in and had left the bowl of cookies out on the table, in plain sight, bare. Before the children could attack, everyone in the house heard-a-rapping on the door, how could they not, it was more like the battering of a ram, as the old woman opened the door, she almost fell back, it was someone she hadn’t seen in many years, and for good reason, it was a postman. She thought “There is no good reason for you to have returned, no good reason at all.” As Roald approached the man, he paused for a minute, he regained his senses, “Well this doesn’t make sense we haven’t seen anyone for days, no one survives alone and without supplies in this part of Alaska.” The thought returned in that instant of his old schoolhouse. For reasons still not clear to Roald, his mind could not stray from all of the wrongs done to him, he grabbed his face in a panic, a fit of rage, he was inconsolably hysterical. He could not shake the awful memories of how his teacher and how he would leave Roald out in the cold, bare. There, once again, his attention, returned to this man, the postman. Roald had no words; no words for him at all. Comments are closed.
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