It was Sunday morning when the letter arrived. I remember because there isn’t usually any mail delivery on Sundays. I always loved Sundays. I never really cared about religion and thought it was silly for an entire allegedly “secular” country to get a day off to worship a Christian god that I knew was not really there. But at least it was one less day that people had to work.

Everything else about the day was ordinary. I had been woken up as always by Persephone licking my face. I was sitting on the sofa in the living room at the front of the house sipping a cup of coffee with my feet tucked up next to me. Persephone - a small scruffy brown dog - was curled up next to my feet. The sun was streaming through the windows as I gently stretched my neck muscles and waited for my body to stop feeling so stiff. I was used to mornings beginning with grogginess, stiffness, and pain. Everything was as expected.

What I did not expect was for an unmarked white envelope to suddenly slide through the mail slot. The little flap on the front of the mail slot made a loud, metallic clanking sound as it was opened and another as it closed and the letter fell onto the entryway floor. The sound startled Persephone. She abruptly stood up and let out a single sharp bark. “Chill out,” I said, standing up slowly and moving my stiff, tired muscles over to the door to pick up the envelope. I turned it over in my hands wondering why there was no address on it. Maybe it had been delivered here by accident. I pressed my eye to the peep hole and peered out, but didn’t see anyone.

As I stepped back and continued to look at the envelope still in a sleepy haze, I noticed what appeared to be a single dirty fingerprint near the edge of the seal. I could see every line of the arched print, and it looked a lot like the time I pressed my own fingers into an ink pad and put them down on paper as part of a forensics class in college. “Weird,” I thought to myself as I stuck my finger into the flap and tore the envelope open. “If this is full of anthrax I’m going to be so pissed,” I said, half to Persephone and half to myself.

Inside the envelope was a single sheet of white paper. It was mostly blank, but it had some words on it in the center that looked as though they had been typed using a very old typewriter with insufficient ink. A few of the letters seemed to be more suggestions than actual shapes. It said:

“Jamie,

If you are reading this, we are in enormous danger.

Help yourself to help us both.

- Jamie”

I furrowed my brow skeptically and turned the sheet of paper over to see if there was some additional information in the back. There was nothing else. “Well this is a stupid prank,” I told Persephone, rolling my eyes and tossing the letter and the envelope onto the kitchen table. I went to plop back down onto the couch and return to my coffee, but something about the letter bothered me. I sensed something weird and familiar but just out of reach, like a word that’s on the tip of your tongue.

I got up and looked at the fingerprint on the envelope again, and examined my own fingers. The print looked a little like my own fingerprints, which I had learned in my forensics class were a “rare” type. I walked slowly to my office at the back of my narrow shotgun house with the envelope in my hand and Persephone following at my heels. I sat down carefully in the office chair at my desk where I rummaged through my disorganized drawers pushing aside paper clips, stickers, and markers until I found what I was looking for. Persephone was sitting next to my chair looking up at me as I pulled out the ink pad. I laid the envelope down flat on the desk with the fingerprint facing me. “This is so stupid,” I told Persephone as I opened the ink pad and pressed my left index finger into the black ink. I pressed my inked finger down onto the envelope next to the dirty fingerprint in the same way I had in forensics class. I held my breath and stared.

I realized that my fingerprint was an exact match to the dirty one on the envelope just as a huge BOOM sounded at the front of the house. I felt the sound reverberating in my chest as I scooped up the terrified, shaking Persephone and told her “Guess we’d better run!”