Short story · 4 min read · Set in Kestrel Road ·
The Postman of the Wrong Nights
Mail arrives on Kestrel Road only in the small hours of rounds no rota lists, and every house served stands empty at those hours, its people elsewhere by habit or design.
The rota pinned in the Kestrel Road sorting nook ran Monday to Saturday, 8.10 a.m., one round, one man, A. Ferris of the bag with the mended strap. That was the round the Council knew, and the round Ferris walked, and on the parish map his timings were accurate to the minute, Wednesday to the butcher's at a quarter past, Friday to the schoolhouse door by half past.
The other round was never on any paper. It ran in the small hours, Thursdays and sometimes a Sunday if the moon was wrong, and the houses it served were the houses Kestrel Road kept empty at those hours, which was most of them, and in thirty-one years nobody had caught the other postman's face, though eleven people could describe his boots.
The emptying was the kestrel of the whole business, and the road did not speak of it in plain words. At night, on Kestrel Road, nobody was at home, and it was a matter of schedule rather than luck: the vicarage party was always elsewhere, and the bakers were by then up at the ovens. Out of thirty-one households you could not, at that hour, find a soul under a Kestrel Road roof. The road's own people called it the politeness, and if pressed would say only: *the round comes at its hours, and the houses are left for it,* the way a hall is left for dancing.
The post came at those hours regardless: a letter through a letter box in an empty hall, the flap sharp on the tile floor, the sound of a house taking its mail alone. What the letters were, no one had established, because no envelope ever bore the address of a person who could be reached in daylight. They were addressed by function rather than by name — *To the occupier who is not at present the occupier.* *To the household currently absent. Of Kestrel Road.* The hand on them varied, but the habit of it was one habit, and Ferris, who had walked the day round for nine years and knew every doorstep's rheumatism, admitted once in the nook, over the book, that he had never collected from the road a single outgoing reply.
*Nothing goes back out,* he said. *Not a redirectory. Not a re-turn. Thirty-one years, the road takes and the road keeps.*
The eleven boots-witnesses, over the decades, agreed on their fragment and disagreed on nothing. The round came without a bicycle, walking pace, the bag riding high on the hip the way old rounds-men carried — and carried heavy, heavy enough that the strap groan carried across the road at three in the morning. The deliveries were patient. Flaps tested twice. Letters laid flat, never wedged. At every house the man stopped, in the light of a lamp nobody lit, and stood a moment on the step as a caller stands, listening to the emptiness, before beginning his round of the gardens.
The night of the 13 December 1967, Mrs Ansell, the widow at number 19, had come home early from her overnight hospital sitting, against all the road's custom, at ten past three, and found the bags in the hall of her own house: one small, one heavy, laid straight against the skirting like kindling. The footprints in the frost went on past her gate and faded at the corner of Harbison's wall, not at a door, simply the corner, as if the round had a way-station the parish map did not.
She called the sorting office in the morning, and the office called Ferris, and Ferris came out at 8.10 with the mended strap and weighed the bags in the hall, and his face over the scale was the face of a man reading correspondence that isn't addressed to him. Inside were letters, layered, decades of Thursdays of them, and every one he lifted was addressed to a house on a street that is not Kestrel Road and was never built there — a street name on each of them that the widow could read plainly at arm's length and found she could not, an hour later, pronounce from memory.
Ferris did his explanation in the nine words the service used for everything it did not want said twice: *Delivered elsewhere. Non-returnable. Held at the road.*
But that night, and every night the widow sat afterwards, the houses were empty on schedule to the very minute, and the letters did not begin arriving again until she went back to her sister's over the water, when the round resumed its old times, its old weight, its old patience at the flaps.
The bags inside number 19 were never started from the hall, and the widow's key only turns the door from the outside now.
Who does the round believe is at home?