HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA

The first note that came was simple. It read: I’m watching you. It was made of cut out newspaper headlines and I almost felt bad for laughing. It was like an arts and crafts project. He would have needed a glue stick. I showed it to Gina, of course. I showed her everything. Gina didn’t find it funny, but she watched too much true crime. The sender did too, probably.

2 weeks later my TV was stolen. I reported it to the police. I knew it was gone, but I needed a report for my rental insurance. Gina gripped my arm tightly and shook me vigorously when I told her about this: you should have told them about the note. I was angry. I told her: the note isn’t anything.

Another note came through my door a week later. It was graphic. I showed Gina, and tried to make her laugh at it too. She didn’t. She slowly raised a hand to her mouth and said: are you not scared?

They kept coming. Left on my steps, through my letterbox, pinned to my windshield, one time even stuffed in my birdhouse. I took them in and flipped cursorily through them the same way I did with junk mail. One time I found a dead squirrel on my doorstep, but I think that was unrelated. Gina suggested I move in with her for a while, but I didn’t. I used to tell the story over pints, at dinner parties, by the water cooler at work. Eventually, I had told it so much, I had a perfect routine. I took all the right pauses and described a shrimpy nutcase drooling over me. I was not very pretty, which made it funnier. It got such a good reaction that I signed up for an open mic. I did my tight five, and everyone laughed. A comedy booker asked me to do another slot, a longer one, but I shrugged and said: I have only one joke.

After 6 months, and hundreds of letters, Gina made me install a security camera. After that, the letters arrived by post, stamped and sealed, with the address too made of newspaper headlines glued to the envelope. The letters decreased in frequency then. I theorised that the additional postage cost dampened the sender’s spirits. Every 50 letters, there was a delay till the next. He must have been buying a sheet of 50 stamps at a time.

Eventually, Gina knocked on my door, and thrust a newspaper into my face and said: it is time to go to the police. I studied the newspaper font before I read it. It detailed a woman’s body. It asked if anyone knew her. She cried and cried: I don’t want to identify you in a morgue. She was being dramatic, but I went to the police to appease her. They took swabs of my doorstep and seized any letters I still had. They did try, I think, but nothing came of it.

I lived in that house for 2 more years, receiving letters that entire time. Nothing happened. When we had been in our new place for a few months, and had received no letters, Gina said: thank god the nightmare is over. I shrugged. Most women are killed by their partners anyway.

By Gabrielle Fullam