Diary fragment · 2 min read ·
My Stamped Envelope for Later
A stationer sets the franking machine's date wheel forward to April out of idle habit, and the post moving through her shop begins to carry postmarks that agree.
- dated: "the stationery weeks"
- narrator: "Nora Pinn, stationer"
Thursday 14 January. Quiet in the shop between the Christmas paper clear-out and the new stock, so I did what I do when there is nothing to do, which is fuss with the franking machine. Cleaned the die, oiled the wheel, and then, for no reason I can put in a ledger, I rolled the date wheel forward to April and franked a spare envelope with it. One clean strike, dated for April, on an envelope going nowhere. I put it in the drawer under the till and thought no more about it. It seemed the sort of joke a shop plays on itself in a slow week.
Tuesday 2 February. A customer left an addressed envelope for me to frank with the stamps she had bought, which I do twenty times a day. The wheel was set to today. I stamped it, handed it back, and it was only when she was at the door that I saw the envelope carried two date marks, today's correct one and, under it, fainter, April's. She did not notice. I did not call her back. What would I have said.
Friday 19 February. It is not only mine now. Envelopes I frank correctly, wheel set right, are going out of the shop carrying April somewhere in the mark, and I cannot strike a second impression to cover it because the second impression just adds April again. I took one along to the post office counter and asked the clerk had he seen such a thing. He read the date line, said it reads as April to him, and pushed it through his own stamper to be done with it. Two Aprils now, side by side. He wished me a good afternoon.
End of the month. The spare envelope has not stayed in the drawer. I open the drawer in the morning and it is there; I am certain I shut the drawer; and yet twice now it has come back to me postmarked, gone round the town and returned, though I never posted it, though I keep the drawer shut, though the shop was locked between. It is not received anywhere. It is only carried, and brought home, and set back under the till with the courtesy of a thing on an errand.
I have not franked anything at all today. The wheel is set to today and has been for a fortnight, checked and rechecked. So if April keeps arriving at my counter without my setting it, whose date is April keeping — and what is it that I am meant to be sending on, come spring?