My friends and I are in an on-again/off-again writing club where the rules are simple. Every two weeks you have to submit three short stories that it took you 20 minutes or less to write. These are the results.

Yesterday we got a letter signed,

Sincerely,

A. Meester

First thing we thought, “Why italics?”  Does he think they automatically make a word more sincere, any word, but none more so than Sincerely?  Or is he being sarcastic in text?  And no chance that’s his real surname, let alone the initial, unless his mom gave birth in a Mexican train station and named the kid after something she heard a running kid scream after a tourist.

The letter was addressed to me and my kraut-girlfriend-at-the-time Uli, with our names spelled correctly and the word kraut right there on the envelope. The letter was nothing but passages of violence, page after page of detailed physical assaults, the promise of large wounds, so we ignored the content and focused on the writer’s name alone.  If we could somehow prove false the identity behind this fake name, we’d extinguish the threat.

We couldn’t think of a single person who gave enough of a shit about one of us, let alone the two of us combined, who could possibly want to get off the couch, put his shoes on and come all the way the fuck out here just to kill us, of all people.

Uli’s German, so there’s that.  We’re a mixed race couple, but we live in Brooklyn and we didn’t wear giant sunglasses and scarves everywhere so we figured they’d have killed those people first and I just saw two of those douchebags on the way in the house so that’s not it either.

But one thing we did, better than any two humans I’d ever seen before or since, is dance.  Uli said maybe we made somebody feel so bad about their own dancing that they didn’t want something that pure to live in anyone’s heart, so let’s nip this gorgeous shit in its bud.

I disagreed.  I said they probably had us mixed with somebody else and were seconds away from kicking in the shitty door and shooting us both in the face.  I said, “Fuck it all, let’s jump out the window,” and she agreed because we were on the first floor and the car was out back.