The band that holds the day's post

On the kitchen counter, in the front hall, propped against a bowl of keys, the day's mail arrives already bundled by hand at the point of delivery, a single rubber band wound once or twice around catalogs, bills, and the odd handwritten envelope that stands out by being thinner than everything around it. The band itself is rarely a fresh one; postal carriers tend to reuse bands recovered from earlier routes, so the one holding today's mail may have circled someone else's electric bill the week before, a small and entirely invisible act of recycling nobody clocks. Left in place, it presses a faint ridge into the top and bottom envelopes within a day, a line that stays even after the band comes off, like a belt mark. Most households remove it at the counter and either discard it or add it to a growing ball of identical bands kept in a kitchen drawer for reasons nobody has fully worked out, though everyone seems to keep one. Weather affects it more than people expect: a band left on mail through a humid week turns brittle and snaps at the first stretch, littering the counter with a small dry curl of rubber that has to be picked out from between the envelopes. Its grip loosens with reuse, so a band on its second or third bundle sits looser than one freshly wound. It performs one job, briefly, and is gone before the mail is even opened.

Doreen Fitch