Entry Seventy-three: Adam Mahoney, You Just Won!

[The next many entries are the current story I am working on. This is three of who knows how many will be posted. Enjoy it while it lasts...]

He picked up the envelope and saw his name on the front in a fancy script, obviously handwritten with care and skill. “Mr. Adam Mahoney. Well, that’s me, but where did this come from?” He rifled through his memory, trying to remember if he had been handed the envelope elsewhere and had absent-mindedly left it on the counter but he knew even as he walked through that exercise he had nothing to do with the letter or card or invitation. That meant someone had snuck into his house and placed it there, which wasn’t that big of a surprise since his hometown was rural and small and locking the house was more of an afterthought than a necessity. He turned the envelope over and chuckled as he saw that it had been sealed with red wax, an obvious imprint of an official seal embedded sloppily in the center. “Fancy,” he said as he turned it to a severe angle in order to manipulate the light to hit it in such a way that he could see it better but there had been too much shift when whoever created it had mashed the seal into the wax. It offered no clues.

He set the envelope down, dropped two spoons of sugar in his cup and poured a cup of coffee. He wasn’t one to rush into a mystery and this definitely qualified, at least in his life. Ever since his divorce he had tried to cut back on his uncharacteristic bouts of spontaneity that, according to his ex-wife, was one of the contributing factors to their breakup. She never could understand that after spending full days in a cubicle, answering phones at the customer service desk at the plant, he occasionally needed to stretch his wings, so to speak, and he could never be certain how or when that might occur. But he was trying to change and this seemed like a great situation to practice some discipline.

All words and images ©2006/J. Colle