The Bear and Barnacle

Val weaves across the lawn at a dead run, dodging patches of sunlight that would make him more visible to aerial attackers. The disguised hole in the hedge is ahead; he reaches it, drops flat, folds his wings tight, and crawls through at the cost of a few feathers that were coming out anyway (he's almost too big for the hole now; it was a perfect fit when he discovered it). On the other side, he skulks along the hedge, surveying the area before he leaves cover and makes a mad dash to the neighbors' front porch. He wedges his arm through the hole and then there's a storm of barking -- damn it, he's been seen! He seizes the prize, tears his arm out of the opening and flees. No stealth this time -- he has to get to safety.

Back on his own turf, he pauses to take deep, calming breaths. The next stage of the mission is not so easy.

He sneaks around the corner of the house, slowly, carefully, trying to avoid the view of the neighbor's windows. Two enemies are within; a girl his own apparent age, and her mother. Either could chance to look out the window at any time. Stealth is of the essence.

Creeping along in the shadow of the front stoop, he watches for any sign of motion, then attacks. Adrenaline making his heart race, he drops back to the shadow, but he can't run this time; he must sneak back, darting low from tree to bush to flowerbed to hedge, sticking to the shade, moving only when he's sure he's unseen.

Mission accomplished, he plops down on the driveway and reviews his loot. From the family on the right, three flimsy envelopes of junk mail; from the elderly couple on the left, what looks like a greeting card and the real prize, their water bill.

He takes the contents of the neighbors' letter boxes inside and climbs on a chair to leave them in the coffee grounds, where they're sure to be found soon.

Stealing the post shows how low he's sunk, for a former priest of War, but it gives him something to do.

There are quite a few songs about letters. Some are happy (My Baby She Wrote Me a Letter) and some are sad (Please Mr Postman and Return to Sender), but nothing can quite convey the giddiness one feels upon first seeing that owl and parchment (or the envelope). Good news or bad? You can’t ever really know until you open and read the thing. And sometimes, what seems like some of the best news ever can go so abysmally wrong you just can’t credit it.
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