Owl in tweed cap and argyle sweater

Back before the Drowning Years, when the motorways still had their paint, there lived an owl on the edge of a town called Lesser Hanbury. He was not an owl that hunted. He sorted parcels. The post office had closed and the building fell to ivy, but he kept the sorting room the way the clerks left it, and every night he walked the counter in a checked cap and a sweater with diamonds up the front, buttoned to the throat, because a man who keeps the post ought to look like he means it.

One winter the river rose over the lane and the letters stopped coming. A girl came up the hill with a bundle wrapped in oilcloth, soaked through, asking for a stamp. She had no coins, only a red flower pressed flat in the corner of her envelope. The owl studied it through his round orange eyes for a long while. Then he licked the stamp himself, tapped it down with his beak, and said the letter was paid for. Nobody had ever asked him for a thing so small.

She went down the hill with a lighter bag and a grin on her face. The owl kept that flower in the till drawer for forty years, and when the rain finally came back to the valley, they say, he was still there, buttoning his sweater against the draught, waiting for the next letter that wanted sending.