The Post

It’s magic, the way it works is just magic. I can’t tell you how I know but I’ve come across this knowledge one way or another. It’s very complicated and I don’t know all of the intricacies of how things happen but I’ve got a rough overview of the process.

Firstly, someone has something they need to post, sure, we all know what that’s like. It’s happening less and less often but it’s still going on every day isn’t it? Well, then they need an envelope and a stamp. Now I know that you think you know what the stamps are all about but I’m here to tell you that part is actually false, all the stamps are for is the licking. It’s the saliva that they’re after. You take your newly stamped letter and you drop it in the post box on the corner, it goes through the slot and falls into the dark box. You forget about it then, assume it will arrive at its destination and you go on with your day.

What happens will probably surprise you. First it’s the scrapers who jump into action. They pull off the stamp and scrape off the saliva, weigh it, glue your stamp back on and then stamp your envelope with what you think is a postmark. The quality of this stamp, the darkness and alignment is a way of noting the amount of saliva the scrapers where able to get from you. You see saliva is the most important part of this whole process. Human saliva is what fairies live on, it’s their sustenance and their treat. You may think that the scrapers have a terrible job but in fact they are at the very top of the fairy hierarchy, they are the most trusted, dealing with all of that valuable spittle.

After your stamp is placed back onto the envelope with a light glue. Your letter is then past on to the logistical team. This is where things get a bit more complicated. How your particular letter is treated now depends on the postmark that was put on it by the scrapers (not at some “post office” or similar fable you might have heard). The letters that came in with the most saliva are treated with the highest priority. These posters are rewarded with quick reliable and unfaltering treatment, the very best logistical fairies are given these cases, these are the fairies that will one day be scrapers if they keep working hard.

The letters are sorted into a series of magical tubes and chutes, they’re intertwined and knotted and they run all through the town and across the countryside, underground and through building basements and attached to the bottom of bridges. They’re like a giant twisted pipe organ. You might be thinking that you’ve seen the post office people emptying the post boxes. Well of course you think you have, there are humans in on the system and they work very hard to keep up the façade and make people think that the mail is an orderly system controlled by people.

The main problem with the system, of course, is that not all fairies are created equally. There are some who are just about confused by this system as you and I might be, they put letters into chutes that go nowhere, or go in the wrong direction, or maybe just miss their intended destination narrowly. These letters mostly arrive eventually, not that many are lost. But this is why sometimes things seem to get lost in the post. It’s not a flaw in the postal system as such, the system works perfectly for those fairies who have managed to understand it fully, it’s only by the mistakes of the other fairies that things break down a little bit. They aren’t bad forever, you see a fairy doesn’t die, a fairy has a lot of time to perfect its job, eventually they manage to get their tiny little heads around the system. So if you look at it a different way, late mail is really only a learning process, it’s always improving. The only thing you can do to help is to play your part, the one part of the process that you’re in control of is how much postage you pay. So remember to lick your stamps generously, and maybe even leave a few drips coming out of the sticky part you close the envelope with, every little bit helps to get your letter delivered on time.