I was just in Abdali at the post office there, sending a bunch of documents to Canada using their Express Mail Service. It was a cold day today so as usual my hands were freezing and purple with extremely red fingertips (for obvious reasons indicated in Wishing for a Transporter).

I walked in and the lady employee there recognized me instantly since I had been to this office some three or four times during the past month alone. We did the usual; wrote the recipient’s detailed address and their phone number, my address and phone number, weighed the package, labeled it clearly, etc.

The lady got busy lecturing a new employee on how to weigh things and on the country codes used for each delivery and in the meantime I was admiring the new decor of the post office, then something caught my eye. I looked at my documents’ envelope and noticed a red, elongated blob smack in the middle of the brown material containing my documents.

I immediately knew what it was. My fingers were bleeding again, damn them! I snatched the envelope while the lady employee was looking away and quickly took a tissue out of my bag and tried to wipe the blood away. I thought the ladies would definitely think I am either weird or just disgusting having bloodied an official package like that just before sending it off. Obviously, had they taken a look at my fingers they would have thought that of me anyway, but I wanted to cheat fate.

Wiping the blood away did not work. I got slightly nervous since it had dried out already and it was not going away, so I simply turned the envelope upside down and gave it back to the lady employee at the post office, who took it and put it in a nice delivery envelope and did not see the gore I had just produced. It looked like I had murdered ten little fingers and dragged their corpses on the envelope, quite a scene.

While she was working on entering the shipment data, I got busy controlling what other damage my fingers had done. I often end up with bloodied collars, or bloodied exam papers, or bloodied bags so I was checking anything and everything I had touched. My fingers, when injured, bleed when it’s cold and always I find some blob somewhere that reveals what has happened. They don’t hurt when they bleed, so that’s a good thing at least.

I just wonder how the officials at the other end of the documents’ destination will react to a brown envelope full of academic rhetoric and semi-soaked in red-black blood. I wonder if it will clear security, actually.