I have been waiting for a package to arrive from UPS for weeks. They just sent me my third delivery notice with the third different delivery date. Will I finally get it? I idly thought of spells that might do the trick while at work Thursday, then wrote this story at Pack Rat Gaming while my boyfriend played Malifaux. Not one word was AI generated.
—-
When the moon is hidden by the clouds, and the winds howl, sending hunched travelers indoors and trash bins clattering down the road, a screaming brown beast prowls, its gleaming eyes stabbing the unfortunate ground in its path. It is said that you can catch this, and if your hands are quick and your will is strong, it will give you a package. A moment too late or too early and you may find only a yellow slip scrawled with incomprehensible sigils, or nothing.
“At home,” said Latha, as she drew sweeping dots and curves on a large scrap of cardboard, “we would draw a kolam — a kind of mandala drawn with rice flour, very powerful, very special. When we knew a package was due, my sisters and I would draw a kolam in front of our house. Just before dawn, when the air was cool. My brothers would hide in the bushes, and when the Delhivery man came by —“
“Delhivery? Delhi-very? That can’t be real,” I said.
“It’s real enough,” protested Latha. “If our minds were calm and our hearts open, our kolam would lure in the Delhivery man as he roared by on his scooter. He would stop and look at the kolam, and my brothers would grab him by the legs and demand our package, and if he had one, he would give it to us in return for his freedom.”
“And if he didn’t have one for you?”
Latha shook her head. “Very bad, very bad. The Delhivery man would curse you, then he would turn into smoke and fly off. Very important that you have the delivery notification before you start the kolam.”
Latha had been drawing the entire time. She’d connected the dots and curves to form an intricate pinwheel that forced the eye to follow the design to the center; the petals of the flower there seemed to spin in counterpoint to the swirls outside.
“That — that looks amazing. We can use that to capture the UPS man?”
“No, no,” she said, as she tore the kolam she’d drawn into strips, then shredded the strips into the small three-legged brazier she’d brought. She found a lighter in her bag, and set the remains of the kolam aflame. “The UPS men travel too swiftly; they would never see the kolam. We will need something different to get them to stop.”
“I have just the thing,” I said. I opened the fridge, and poked around a bit. I’d been saving this for a winter’s snow, but desperate times, desperate measures. I set the bottles on the table; the black glass quickly beading over with condensation. “Allagash Black. Brewed on the slopes of Mount Katahdin, rising like a fist from the darkest forest in Maine.”
Latha’s eyes glistened. “That will do nicely.”
—-
We rose before the dawn. Fog curled around the dogwood trees; their fall-touched leaves hung limp in the motionless air, limned dimly by the glow of the streetlight. Latha drove her Prius down the street to the CVS, I followed her in my old Beetle. We left the cars parked there and walked back together. I set the stouts on the front steps where they were sure to be seen, then slipped in through the back door and with a little bit of ceremony, turned off the main power. To any passerby, it would seem the house was empty of all life, abandoned.
“They will never come if they think there is someone home,” I explained. Latha nodded. “Very wise. The UPS men will be sure to stop.”
“But how will we force them to give us the package?”
Latha thought for a moment. “You must use the symbols of your culture. That is the only way.”
I nodded.
I’d barely been in the shed in back since we’d bought the house. It was filled with stuff the previous owner had left behind — a snow blower that didn’t work, rusted paint cans… and some better things. He’d left behind an old six pack — the print so faded it was hard to tell the brand, but the outline of a square-rigged brigantine made it clear it was Narragansett — not as powerful a New England brew as the Allagash, but it would serve its purpose. The cans had split ages ago, the beer gone. We set three cans at the end of the driveway, with candles glued to the tops with melted wax. One on the north side, one on the south, one in the center equally spaced from the others. Their eyes would be drawn to the prize on the steps.
On the dogwoods, we wrote the sacred sigils of our time. The left one “4”, drawn in the florid colonial style. The center, “2”, its tail circling the trunk seven times, and the third, an “0” with a line drawn through it. The candles told of a gift; the numbers were a promise.
We waited in silence. I fell asleep for a moment. I woke to the sound of breaking glass; the driveway candles brightened and then went dark; there was a knock at the door.
Delhivery is a real thing. One of our team members at work made a beautiful kolam for a recent festival, and it was mesmerizing.