Greetings
Did I order already? I asked myself when the doorbell rang. I had decided that early Sunday afternoon on pizza rather than reheating yesterday’s pork lo mien. But no, my cellphone laid dark on my coffee table; the pizza app no less untapped. Then who was at my door? I pondered.
I spied through the peephole to see my mystery guest. Where a distorted adult face should have been there was nothing, however a tiny figure stood at the bottom of my distorted plane of vision.
Normally, I would have asked, “who is it?” But I opened up expecting to see a child soliciting for his school. Rather miniaturized, a fully formed adult male smiled up at me. He wasn’t a dwarf as his proportion were as perfect as a man three times his size.
“Good day, sir,” he smiled bobbing his head in the way of an old fashioned gentleman. “May I interest you in my line of greeting cards?” He didn’t sound like a Munchkin from the Wizard of Oz, but resonated a deep voice. And yet it was wispy, carried on the wind as if on an echo coming from faraway.
“No, I’m sorry.” But before I could shut my door upon this weird salesman, he swung up his equally tiny leather briefcase and popped its little brass latches. The lid sprang open to reveal a stack no larger than a pack of playing cards. “I don’t need any, thank you.”
“But please just look at one of them, if you will?” he asked. “That way I can report to my superiors I attempted a sale.”
I indulged him and picked up the stack. They were not out of the ordinary, and yet they were since they looked like the old greeting cards you might find in an antiques mall. The covers were bland scenes of tiny red rosebuds or bluebirds carrying ribbons in their beaks all water-colored in faded, pastels. Even the card stock of was creamy texture no longer found even from Hallmark.
“There’s nothing here that interests me,” I told him.
“Just open one.” He persisted. I was getting testy and my stomach agreed; I had a pizza to order. Even so, I looked down expecting to read some generic sentiment printed in an embossed scripted. When I raised my head, the evening dusk surrounded me. The tiny man was gone and in his place was my neighbor from the across the breezeway.
“Are you okay?” she asked. Her look concerned.
“Ah, yes.” Though I didn’t think I was.
“I been calling and calling your name. You just stood there staring at that thing your hand. What is that?”
I held up the greeting card, but it was no longer a fold sheet of old paper. Now it was a thin sheet of cold metal with a surface as shiny as any mirror.
“Is that one of them new iPhones?” My neighbor laughed as she walked to her own door. “Man, they getting thinner and thinner. You need to quit looking so hard at them face books. A person could come up, knocked you in head, and robbed you blind. You take care, now.”
“Sure, thanks.” I shut my door to dark and looked back at the thing in my hand. How had the man switched it? I looked about my apartment expecting things to be gone. Nothing was and all my money and credit cards were still in my wallet.
“What the fuck,” I said out loud.
The sheet of metal in my hand began vibrating and its surface lit up:
Greeting from Another World
Roses are red and bluebirds take wing,
What you hold in hand is a marvelous thing.
Next time you are weary, just give me a call.
And all of your worries, away they will fall.
And then my memory of the past few hours returned. The greeting card had transformed when I opened it up. In its place something I’d never seen in my life. I don’t think anybody could possibly have. Even now I can’t describe it only to say it was a portal to a whole new universe. And why had the miniature man given it to me? That I can’t say.
As I gazed into the magic greeting card, that universe return only now it was of a joyful plane of existence. Thoughts of pizza were gone, as I would never be hungry for anything but my greeting card.
