The crows were cawing oddly on the morning I killed the postman. I didn't expect then that it would sound the way it does now, but I think you know what I mean. At Least I. Showed. Him. I used to watch his approach each morning through the trapezoidal window in my parlor: little scrapes on the cold bright cement squares. Crows outside. His steps were mincing and small in the little puffy black sneakers preferred by members of his employ. The squeaking of his paperclip-like mail trolley seemed unbearable. Like. Some. Kind. Of. Joke. On some days I swear I could see the nose of a toy bear, or the irises of a doll, poking out from behind metered letters. Then the mail would either plop through the swinging door, or jam through it violently during the weeks near holidays when the mails are inflated by circulars. His tricks were insultingly obvious. Sometimes the fraud was so obvious it made me want to bark with laughter. Really, the fact that it had been opened was clear enough. But when it arrived in clumsily taped wads, stuffed back into irregularly-shaped triangualar evelopes, and riddled with spelling errors- well, this was too much to take. I know what the penalty is for mail tampering, and I'm sure a postman does too- ha ha ha. I have faith that the people at the Agricultural Patent Office tried many times to mail me my notification, but could only do so much in the face of these determined interceptions. On the morning I killed the postman, the cold bright cement squares were strangely devoid of leaves. Letters soon scattered in their stead. The crows were cawing oddly. I didn't expect then that it would end up the way it did now. Stuffing the postman's remains into plumbing pipes was not a good idea. I thought that his arms and puffy little feet would be carried away into the sewers, but I must have gotten it backwards. When they travelled in the opposite direction and began to stop up my toilet, I had to go through many plungers to get rid of them. I wasted a lot of time doing this when I could have looking for my letter.