Blank (FLC #59, short story, public repost)

This is a response to Week #59 challenge, at the group Short Story First Line Challenge.

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I opened the envelope more out of curiosity than anything else. A neat A4 sized creamy envelope. It smelled of rebuff though, like the rest of her sisters queuing for the trash bin. After one year and some change of constant and predictable rejections, I’ve come to sense them just by a mere touch and sniff. That and the fact that bills were wrapped into their custom colored envelopes. For the first couple of moths, it'd been funny reading their auto-generated replies, you know, the "thank you for your submission, but we won't be offering publication of your manuscript at this stage" crap. But when you keep getting the same copy/paste, it starts rotting on the nerves. Rotting that degraded into me sending manuscripts over manuscripts with years of passionate work to zillions of publishers, and temporary anesthesia to the fingers and brains.

This one felt thicker and I figured maybe I'm getting some criticism too, along with the ditching applause. I stuck my fingers in for the content and dragged them out with a bunch of non-default looking sheets. I carefully and fearfully held then with my fingertips and braced myself for some harsh slapping that proved to be well hidden underneath five blank pages. As in white empty pages. A total of five. Now... given that I was a desperate non-published senior wannabe writer, I obviously couldn't afford living at large and owned no high-tech gadgets like a UV lamp or anything the like that would have allowed me to see printed words on a presumed white page. So I chose the straight and easy path and took the white sheets for what they appeared to be.

I sat my middle age behind on the first unoccupied chair and began rummaging on the recent event. Had someone made a very stupid joke? Had I so badly lost my sense of humor and become unable to discern a friendly and possibly helpful joke from a bad one? Was it a "think about it" thingy that I was supposed to learn something from? For the time being, my head seemed to be living at the same altitude with my middle age behind.

Seated, in front of a small table and with blank white pages spread in front of me, I resisted the either instinctual or hard work developed urge of grabbing a pen. My senses slowly came back into themselves and finally intelligence prevailed. I returned to the abandoned creamy enveloped and observed its back. My correct name and full address written on, no sender name or address and, significant detail, no post stamps.
Conclusively, someone personally placed it in my mail box. Did that mean someone loved me, or rather hated me? It wasn't like one gets an envelope with five blank pages every one in a full moon, I had some rather difficult times deciding whether to worry, laugh, panic or just ignore the whole deal.

I stayed there, right in the middle of my livingroom, turning white page after white page for some good hours, pondering on the deep meaning and implications
of my recent unusual delivery. Late at night I think I overheard the kids whispering sweet "don't disturb mom', look, she's tired" giggles to each other and I have no conscious recall of my husband carrying me into pajamas and bed. The most recent memory I have is this morning's, of my own house smelling of someone else made by breakfast, grinning kids and drooling hubby. Oh, and... a bunch of scribbled papers onto the livingroom coffee table. Of my own handwriting.