Fiction by Kevin Carver
The first thing you need to know is that Momma changed the world. This was back when America was young, in the 1980s. We pumped our gasoline before we paid for it. You believe that? It’s true. Total honor system. Momma’d grip the hose handle with a polite wave to whichever attendant patrolled nearby with a half-ashed cigarette and a broom. She’d casually lean against her 1973 Mercury Marquis, chipped and dented, road-gray except for a replaced passenger door that was all green; she’d wait a short eternity for the click, holster the thing, fall into her seat, wink at me, the panicky child in her rear-view mirror, before cranking the keys and slamming the pedal. Our balding tires screeched to the interstate like a rat without its tail. Occasionally she neglected the hose altogether, either by accident or on purpose, I never knew, and in those moments the Marquis appeared to grow a tail that flapped wild and alive on the sparky highway. She had done it one too many times, Momma later explained to me, and next thing you know: Pre-Pay Only. What total bullshit, she liked to say.
You wouldn’t know it, being so young and clean, but we also lived in a world that wrote checks. You ever write a check? Yeah I didn’t think so. Every day we did, little paper promises at the grocery store, the hardware store. In AutoZone, I don’t know. It didn’t matter if we didn’t have the dough, not really. This was an IOU, Momma explained to me, and it would all figure itself out. What happened? Yeah, exactly. You get it. This guy gets it. Momma wrote one too many IOUs. Now you see her everywhere, don’t you, her laminated legacy reading No Checks.
We were once a nation without IDs. Bet you didn’t know that. America, from sea to shining sea, from the lakes of Tennessee to the hills of Texas, or whatever. People used to shake hands. That was good enough. “Remember that tight ass at your school who didn’t let me pick you up? Had to drag you out of there screaming,” she once told me in between drags of her Basic Filters, the kind from the red and white box. She held her cigarette to her chest like a cross. What total bullshit, she chanted, casually dismissing a traumatic episode from my childhood.
Momma died full of secrets and stories, an excuse for each debt and an escape from every debtor. People still look for her, even now, five years later.
Towards the end she became what can only be described as Proper Crazy. Momma had always been manic and unstable, depressed, you know, but in her final years she progressed into paranoia and schizophrenia. The ugly kind. She wore safety glasses in public. She lined her jackets and shoes with aluminum foil. They were trying to kill her with electricity, she told me. Only twice was I brave enough to ask who they were, scratching the logic, but her eyes would rove onto some new fantasy, some new buzz, a conspiracy of victims and villains.
My house was where she lived her final year, and it was her first settled residence in decades. Forget what you’re thinking. I can see it in your eyes. This wasn’t some magical and sentimental year of burying hatchets or singing showtunes. Momma moved in like a tornado and left much in the same way. It was a tough year that ended tough.
Though the world quickly moved on from Momma, my thoughts were never far from her. One reason is I still received Momma’s mail. Fliers and coupons, collection notices, letters from lost lovers. Junk mail. It grew like mold on my kitchen table. What can I say? You get to a point in your life where you just stop keeping up, and your house reflects the cluttered chaos of your brain. Anyway, debt collectors loved my address because they finally had one with which they could pursue her. Unfortunately for them, Momma fled this mortal gas station. You could say evading was her life’s work and that she died doing what she loved. Ha, I guess you really could say that. I hate it when I snort.
So this mess, the one I’m telling you about today, started eight months ago, long after Momma had passed. I opened my mailbox and found the typical stuff, more of what I just explained. Junk mail for me, some for Momma. There was a bill for me and then there was a letter. It wasn’t for me, and it wasn’t for Momma. It was addressed to my home, to a stranger, someone named Mary Taft. My name’s not Mary Taft, not even close.
I brought the letter inside, took it to my kitchen bar counter, one of the few cleared surfaces left, brushed away those pesky cracker crumbs, and stared at the envelope for God knows how long. I grabbed a dead pen. I searched for more pens. This whole process took, I don’t know, thirty minutes or so. Eventually, I found a living pen and proudly wrote, Not At This Address. I journeyed back to the curb, returned the letter to my mailbox, and, exhausted, flipped the flag like an early settler. Like Tom Cruise in that one movie about the settlers. You know the one. Nicole Kidman’s in it. The Oklahoma settlers. Oh I’ll think of it.
The next day, when I checked the mailbox everything was normal, but the day after that, guess what happened? Another letter for Mary Taft! My home address, again! I brought the letter inside, again! Crossed it out, again! Explained why on the envelope, again! Rejected it back to the mailbox, again!
Frustrating, I thought. Annoying.
The next day was Sunday then the day after that a federal holiday. So it was Tuesday before I finally had mail again. This time I brought the pen with me to the curb and would not bother with that whole exercise back and forth, because I just assumed more Mary Taft mail was in my future. I’m no dummy, okay? Bring your umbrella if it’s raining shit, Momma said to me once. This time it wasn’t a letter. It was an official notice from the Post Office. Notice of Changed Address for Mary Taft. I studied it from the curb. I compared the address on my home to the address on the paper, holding it in the air. I did this four or five times. “Huh,” I finally said.
Mistakes were made. Someone screws up and then you have to pay for it. This was not the first nor I’m sure would it be the last fat-finger typo to inconvenience my life.
Was I angry? No, to be completely honest. It can be thrilling to have a legitimate complaint, for being that person representing unquestionable rightness.
I wanted to really make a show of it too: Look and see, feel the damage of your mistakes! I have a cane, and you make me come all the way down here? My bad knees?
I spent the day thinking all about it. All the different speeches I would give depending on the type of person I found at the counter. This mania, I guess you could call it that, lasted into the evening and then into night where sleep eluded me. I finally slept around three o’clock in the morning, watching reruns on TV Land where families with normal houses and proper lives reacted to inconvenient plots with comical high jinks in black and white.
I awoke to a crash so loud I thought the world was ending.
I rubbed my head, assuming it was a nightmare, and then heard it again. CLANG. CLUNG. BOOM. PSHHHH. The boom banged again. Something horrendous scraped something stubborn. My first thought was that my house was collapsing but thankfully my house wasn’t collapsing. The racket nearly gave me a heart attack.
Not to mention, geez, it was early, and I had been up all night.
So I grabbed my robe, stuffed my feet into mismatching slippers, and marched to my living room window angrier than I might have ever been. I looked and there it was, a shipping container in my driveway. “PODS” was written on its side. A truck with a large trailer was unloading it, the driver winding up the last of his straps.
“Excuse me,” I said through the window. I started yelling. I tapped the glass like a nervous cat. Unbothered, the driver jumped into his truck. I realized I had to get out there. I fumbled through the door and ran out into my driveway. The truck left me behind in a hurry, looking rather carefree and burdenless. I stood there, yes yes yes, like a dingbat in the early morning mist, incredulous, okay? Honestly a little unkempt.
I stared at this shipping container, if you really can believe it, filling up my whole goddamn driveway.
You know those old alien-invasion creature features they play on TCM in October? That’s what it was like when the pod arrived: unannounced and sudden, like a saucer.
I got dressed. I paced around my house for an hour. I guzzled Mr. Coffee’s finest as I looked upon my new travesty, trying to blink it out of existence.
I wondered what the hell was inside it.
Surely nothing nefarious. Furniture and clothing. Lamps. Trinkets. How could I know? It was locked and Mary Taft had the key. I contemplated this mess I found myself in and concluded there were likely three reasonable scenarios that would explain what was happening.
First Reasonable Scenario: I was dead. I had died.
The most fantastical option is sometimes the simplest. You know, Occam’s shaver. Maybe this is how you find out you’re dead. You think you’re alive and pissing and then someday a stranger moves into your home, like the ghosts in Beetlejuice. I found that old VHS tape and popped it into my VCR. Google it and you’ll see what I mean. The machine still worked. Some dancing squiggles on the screen, you know, damage to the tape, but the opening credits hit me like comfort food, and I watched the movie twice, once in awe and then again in tears. I thought I better get up and get dressed to figure out if I was really dead or not.
In Beetlejuice, if you’ve seen it, these poor ghosts are trapped in their home; when they leave they find only sandworms in a wasteland. Me: I was able to freely leave my home, no problem, no sandworms. I already mentioned all my trips to the mailbox. But when was the last time I walked past my mailbox? I suddenly realized I hadn’t been to the grocery store in months. When was the last time I had eaten anything?
Here’s the truth: I clasped onto my mailbox for about twenty minutes, stretching my foot as far as it would go, sweating, shaking, aching, frightened, pausing to wave at walking neighbors, pretending to fix the mailbox without any tools, and finally, you know, after a few false starts and a soldier’s courage, I let go. One step, two steps, further and further down my street I pranced like a possessed ostrich. My neighbors must have had quite the show, but fuck them.
Okay, listen, people who live alone are prone to wild thoughts and flights of fancy and that’s all it was. To be sure though, I drove down to Wegmans and chatted with a cashier. She looked right at me and spoke words. I asked her if I looked okay and she said I looked healthy, which wasn’t exactly what I had asked, but that was fine. I then asked her if I could write a check, and she apologized and said no. She pointed to the sign. No problem, I assured her. Thank you.
Second Reasonable Scenario: the pod was a trap.
The letters were fake. The pod was empty. There was no Mary Taft.
What they wanted me to do was open the letters (more had arrived in the days since the pod invaded my driveway), and these letters would hold instructions. The second you open it they get you. They accuse you of fraud. Then I would have to pay some egregious amount of money that I of course did not have.
Momma would have loved all this.
Or maybe not. Maybe she would have been frightened stiff and used it as an excuse to leave in the middle of the night, as she often did throughout her nomadic and troubled life.
I no longer marked Mary Taft’s letters for return.
I kept them on my kitchen counter in a neat little pile. It would make sense to open one, I finally concluded. I could always reseal it, like they do in those old spy TV shows, and deny, deny, deny. I grabbed an envelope. It was forest green and looked like a holiday card. I held it to the light. This did not help, but it made me feel productive. Sure, the prospect of partaking in everyday espionage excited me. I admit it. I put on a teapot. I waited for the steam. I held the card over the steam, high above so it wouldn’t permanently damage the paper, and patiently waited for the seal to unlick. It took too long, so I ripped it open and hungrily consumed its contents. It was a card, a birthday card with balloons on the cover. Just Wanted To ‘Pop’ By And Say Happy Birthday, it read. On the inside I found, “Happy Birthday, Mary,” written with lazy blue ink and then, “PS: SO excited for you!” I dropped the card and hurried to the sink where I threw up.
Like you’ve never made a mistake? You will. Trust me, you will.
It wasn’t just that I defiled a poor stranger’s mail, some innocent birthday card. What made me sick was that I could feel the paranoia infecting me. I was suspicious of a they. Was Momma’s illness in me too, sprouting like a dormant seed? I hurriedly closed my curtains. I made some tea. The Beverly Hillbillies was on.
Third Reasonable Scenario: Mary Taft was a real person, a nice person.
She was someone you wanted to know. People sent her cards on her birthday even though she was an adult. This meant she was good at sustaining relationships. Salt of the earth, Mary was. She was divorced young and had to pull herself up by her bootstraps. No kids. She lived alone, like me. But Mary’s story was not a sad one. She was a successful woman, a professional individual navigating the challenging and choppy Seas of Life. She made a mistake, okay? She wrote down the wrong address. She’s busy and overwhelmed. Maybe she had a kid after all. She was frazzled. Why wouldn’t she be? A working single mother. Her kid should be so lucky. The mistake snowballed. She gave the wrong address to the Post Office. She gave it to the container company. She gave it to her family and friends. Any day now, I suddenly realized, Mary Taft would show up at her incorrect address, which was also my address.
I frantically started to clean.
The day Mary Taft arrived was, oddly enough, Momma’s birthday. I had a feeling this would happen. I could not tell you why or what it meant, but there you go. I had cleaned up and dressed to the nines. I was all nerves and hit the toilet four or five times before an unassuming blue sedan pulled up to my curb. She stepped out of the backseat and there she was, Mary Taft. Early thirties, neither skinny nor fat, neither tall nor short, a brunette with long hair pulled tightly back. She wore a business skirt with a blazer. High heels. Her legs looked professional. I could not tell you if this was how I had envisioned her or not. The mock sketch I drew of her in my mind fizzled as soon as the real one arrived.
The car was an Uber, or something like that. Her driver helped her retrieve her airline roller bag out of the trunk. He waved and then drove away. Dignified-like, she stood at the curb surveying my property, looking like a realtor standing there. I made a mental note to remember to tell her that. Mary Taft walked to the pod, searched for a key on her person, found it in her cute green pebbled-leather purse, and unlocked it. She rolled up the container door and revealed its contents, which were mostly tools and cleaning supplies.
“Huh,” I said.
It was at this point that I realized she was staring at me. I panicked. Have you ever really panicked? I mean sincerely. People say they panic, but they have no idea what they’re talking about. Imagine the air in this room’s suddenly toxic but you have to keep breathing it anyway. Imagine learning your blood is poisoned and there’s nothing you can do to keep your heart from pumping it into your brain. It’s like the world is ending and your shoes are untied. I felt warm, is what I mean. I had planned to stand at the front door with a friendly wave, but I skiffed it up. What a wretched first impression. I did not want to be a snoop, you know, yet here I was peeking into her steel closet like some brat kid through a keyhole. I cursed. I realized I was scowling, so I smiled. It was a forced smile with too much teeth and an open mouth. I waved. I nailed the wave, I think. Not too strong, not too weak. Not too high, not too low.
Mary Taft did not wave back.
In fact, she dropped her purse and threw her airport roller to the ground and marched to my front door, trying the knob, and then began furiously pounding on the door with her fist. Everything was suddenly very wrong. Incredibly wrong. I listened to her pound on the door as I slowly backed into a closet. BANG. BANG. BANG. POUND. POUND. POUND. I heard her curse in a really nasty way, more inventively than you would think. BANG. BANG. BANG. POUND. POUND. POUND. She must have walked over to where she threw her purse. I heard what sounded like rustling and shifting papers.
“Jamie Tabbelton?” she asked, practically yelling. Oh sure, I thought, let’s bring the neighbors into this. She repeated my name, angrier and louder, and then demanded, “Answer or I call the cops.”
“I’m calling the cops, okay. It’s me who’s calling the cops.” I felt both brave and weak for yelling it. The truth was that I still wanted to fix the situation. Mary Taft and I could still be friends. This was the wrong foot by a mile. The wrong leg, the wrong arm. The wrong house. Broom raised in my hand like a witch, I slowly left my closet, inching forward toward the locked front door that still divided us.
“Jamie Tabbelton, is that you?”
“Yes!” I yelled back. After a beat I added, “Happy birthday.”
It just popped into my head.
“Fucking bullshit,” I heard her say. She stomped off, her heels stabbing the concrete as if she were hunting ants. I ran to the living room window and watched her slam the pod shut. She locked it. She shook her head the whole time, muttering. I think I heard her laugh and say words like unbelievable and fantastic. She grabbed her bags and left the property, freely and without fear, and I never saw her again.
They told me Mary Taft had bought my home.
Paul, a plain-clothed twenty-something college graduate with red ears from the county explained it to me. He said I hadn’t paid my property taxes in five years. He said something about tax deeds. He said they had sent me letters. He said a surveyor came to my house and appraised it, that I had signed papers. “Here, look.”
I told him I thought the surveyor was from the insurance company. The excuse felt flimsy in the light of day and in full knowledge of all the events, but it was true. I also tried to remember if I had forgotten to pay my home insurance.
“The county made an error,” Paul added. He said they forgot to send someone out here to tape off the house and make sure I had vacated the property. “Consider this an official notice: the county is giving you thirty days from today. After that time Ms. Taft will assume the property.”
“What total bullshit,” I said.
“Regardless,” Paul continued while collecting copies of the papers he had me sign and putting them into a folder so I could later not read them, “I would get your affairs in order. Like I said, you have thirty days.” Paul daintily shook my hand and left. I sat and studied the ceiling for a little while, and then I watched Green Acres. It was a good one.
Maybe it would have been easier if I really were dead. I think I would have preferred to haunt Mary Taft. No, really. She would have eventually run out of the house screaming. It would be night, and it would be raining.
Then I realized Mary Taft would never live in my home. She was a flipper, see? She wanted my house’s bones so she could dress them up like a pimp and put them on the corner to slow passing traffic. It’s only been six months and the For Sale sign has already been planted like—oh! Far and Away, that’s the name of the movie, the settlers from Oklahoma.
So look, I tell all of this to you now because it has finally occurred to me that I was scammed out of my home. Scammed! These people were not real people. You see that, don’t you? They were crooks, actors. They were the they Momma had been warning me about.
Who takes a person’s home? You wouldn’t do that.
I want to sue them. That’s why I’m here. Sue, isn’t that funny. Momma’s name was Sue.
All she left me were these safety glasses.
Kevin Carver is a writer, musician, and digital marketer from Oceano, California. A graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Rochester, New York, Kevin’s work has appeared in multiple publications, including 585 Magazine, Spokane +Coeur d’Alene Living, Behind the Setlist, The Inlander, CITY, Reflections, Trestle Creek Review, and more. Additionally, he produced two one-act plays and recently self-published a marketing guide for musicians. His debut fantasy novel, The Forbidden Parallel, will be published in 2025 by Provender Press. Learn more about Kevin online at kevincarver.com.