Anthony “Fergie” Ferguson is a loner, a porn addict, a video game aficiondado, and a stalker. In other words, Fergie is pretty much an average all-American young man. Writer Chris DeBrie’s “Please Forward My Mail” is a novel in serial form, written scene by scene.
3.
Someone who’s really in love doesn’t say ‘maybe,’ he thought. He sneezed, then used a finger to roll snot and booger out of his nostril. Was he talking about her fiance, or about himself? He didn’t know.
The first time he came to watch her he didn’t use the car. Too afraid. He had parked a few blocks away. Sitting in the dark under the big tree, on some pine straw and possibly some toy dog’s poop. Crouching like a small rodent. Arguing with himself, like the little angel and devil who used to whisper in TV characters’ ears. The TV no longer showed the devil and angel thing. Everything was everything, anymore.
They were watching TV now. So were millions of other people—the NFL was on.
They had one of those humongous super high-def machines. Must have been seven feet across. Big screen in a third-floor apartment.
Well, he was still crouching like a shaking mouse. Only now he used his car. Fergie slouched in his seat, lurking in his bush, and he saw the football players clearly. That thing looks realer than real life, he thought.
Arguing with himself. Wondering if he wasn’t really fooling himself after all. Was he just a crazy stalker? Should he give up on the life she had let him taste? Did he need to give up this weird jealousy?
No. He wasn’t jealous; he just needed to lay eyes on her. Even when she was with other people, he needed it. Maybe he didn’t even really want her anymore.
He had seen her enter and leave the TV station. He had watched her eat at that diner downtown. Everything about her still fascinated him, her looks least of all, and her looks were top shelf. That heart-shaped face was helping get her the online career.
This wasn’t some situation where he was just chasing a woman he’d seen on a computer. She had been with him, had given herself to him. So in a way she was his and he was hers… and would be, always.
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