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Never trust a mailman, they are no ordinary creatures.
One of Mymble’s children had told him that once, getting a serious nod from all the others, and Joxter didn’t understand it until now that he stared at the letter in his paws.
“Cheerio,” said the creature, turning around and leaving on terribly heavy steps, packed up with a countless number of letters on his back.
He did not ask the mailman how he’d found him, a mumrik who is never twice in the same place, currently on the snowy top of an impossibly high mountain, he only shivered. The letter was from his wife – even under the humid weather he was able to detect her strong perfume of orange marmalade (Joxter then found she had, indeed, used jam to seal the envelope) and mushroom pie (the crumbles fell out when he opened it) – and though he melted to the scent, he threw the letter away without reading it.
“She forgot again. That I can’t read.” Joxter smiled fondly, staring out into the horizon and barked a very delighted laugh that was full of love and longing. “I’m on my way, dearest.”
“Joxter! How wonderful it is that you’re here, what a pleasant surprise!”
Mymble always greeted him like this, in utter bewilderment, whether they had planned to meet or not. She snatched him right off the ground, as always, and he climbed up her coat to reach her lips himself, as always. Their kiss irradiated passion like never before, however, for a reason he couldn’t quite grasp at the moment; it held an undying happiness and good news to come, which got him wishing he had asked the mailman to read the letter for him a while back.
“You have something important to tell me,” he reminded her against her mouth, gladly suffocating in her embrace and locking his arms around her fluffy fur boa, purring loudly all the while. Her fingers slithered through his unkempt dark hair and growing Winter coat as his caressed the back of her neck. “I can feel it, like the rain that’s ought to come.”
“Five in the afternoon?”
“Five in the afternoon.”
“Dear me, I must take the children off the line!” She set off for the backyard, throwing her husband over her shoulders like a scarf, and Joxter sighed at the sight of thirty-something kids hung by their dresses and overalls on a line, some fighting, some crying, some playing. Mymble Junior seemed to have been set in charge of pinning them back to place in case they fell. “They should be dry by now, I put them there a few hours ago.”
“How many times have I told you to wash children and clothes separately?”
The kids all whooped once their eyes landed on the mumrik, so he jumped off the woman to go and greet each of them, freeing them from the colorful clothes pegs. They tugged on his green coat for attention and delivered overlapping new facts they had learned that year, and, complying, he kissed all of their foreheads individually. Even the eldest Mymble's Daughter. One thing Joxter absolutely adored about mymbles was the way they grinned so brightly and lit up like the sun to the slightest show of affection.
“Are you here because of that letter Dr. Hodgkins sent mother?” she, the one with the most divine blue eyes, asked innocently.
His world went very slow and quiet. He didn’t know if he should smile; he suddenly wasn’t sure if the news were happy ones anymore. Worry took over his features and he put the three children he’d been cuddling down, turning to his wife,
“Where are they, are they coming back?”
Mymble silenced the kids with a sprinkle of water.
“The two of them are visiting for once, with our dear Fuzzy, of course, and Hodgkins 'has informed' he knows about Moomintroll’s 'whereabouts'.”
“You’ve memorized the fancy words he wrote,” he snickered. The mymble admitted so. Joxter took a moment in quietness to process the announcement, lighting his pipe and staring at the unhurried gray clouds above – it had been at least a decade since he'd last seen his best friends, the amount of possibilities and high expectations were nearly overwhelming – but when he looked up to see the redhead’s deep, urgent air, he bristled (it was very, very rare for a mymble to look so solemn). Could it be that they were, in the end, visiting for a proper goodbye? Were they coming back to share a misfortune? “What else has he written? Are they alright? Please, My, tell me why they've contacted us.”
“Moomintroll has been looking after our son.”
Joxter choked on smoke.
“His name,” muttered the man, distantly, “is a frigging pun .”
Deep down, both of them knew they wouldn’t have named him any better. It wasn’t really the main issue as they strolled downhill with a swarm of noisy children in front of them, reassembling a herd of sheep led by Mymble's Daughter, who knew the way to Moominvalley for some reason. The mumrik felt his whole body trembling, no matter how close he stood to his exceptionally warm love in that chilly weather, also, Mymble had started sniffling regardless of her thick cloak. They wondered if they were too broken to reach the valley without falling apart midway.
A downpour started (5PM it was). Joxter's pipe flooded up. His companion finally teared up,
“I'm so sorry.”
“You're just as much to blame as I am.” Both of them owed their baby boy thousands of apologies, but they'd already forgiven each other. There was no use in saying sorry right then. “We've both messed up. The kit must hate us – I honestly can't blame him – or maybe he doesn't even know of our existence. You know, I've once convinced myself that it would be better to stay this way. Because he'd never have to…”
“Sleep in a dusty cabinet? Or wash up outside in the garden's spigot even in the cold. Or fight for food since none of us can cook or have to yell to be heard or deal with occasional bad fathers or-”
“Or say goodbye to all of you every year for his trips, Mymble. He's a mumrik, half a mumrik, at least, but we don't know if he'd enjoy travelling with me once we don't know how he's been raised.”
“Hopefully not like a moomintroll.”
“Hopefully,” he laughed, puffing out some smoke. “Still, it didn't take much for me to change my mind.”
“How come?”
“When we bring him back home – if he wants to come with us – we will love him terribly. We'll make up for all those years he spent alone by cherishing his very presence. That's what we should have done from the start, that's what we'll do now, no matter whether he decides to stay with Moomin or not. Then all of those will mean nothing."
Mymble beamed with determination, nodding down at her husband with her bold gleeful eyes, and Joxter couldn't help but smile dorkily at the sight, although anyone would have enough cultural sense to know mymbles barely ever keep their promises (they forget them right up).
It was just the way they were built, he'd guess. Mymbles were day dreamers and night thinkers, beauties that could find beauty in anything. They were so awfully different from mumriks, who were absolute menaces, hooligans, detached from the regular world. Goodness, if those two creatures could love each other as much as they did, how could they have forgotten to love Snufkin? Snufkin, the perfect mix between the two of them, a gracious, lawless being for sure, one that saw the wonder in this spiteful world? How could they have given up on finding him even for a second?
“We shall love him correctly this time. That's all that matters for now,” his wife told him. And upon seeing the rooftop of a blue house in the distance, they shivered once again, anxiety and expectation running through their bodies like electricity, before grounding one another by intertwining their fingers together.
“So we shall.”
When the time to see the kit arrived, they telepathically decided they were not in any place to go inside, even if they were getting frost bite out in the rain, once Snufkin hadn't had the opportunity to create a single memory in theirs. Besides, they all looked miserable. But the young mumrik rushed through the front door to meet them, inspecting the five creatures in the garden before deducing Muddler, Fuzzy and Hodgkins were surely not relatives of him and widening his sparkly eyes up at his parents in a silent question.
Joxter threw his arms open.
His son leaped from the porch right into his father's hold, giggling, and his mother lifted them in her arms, squeezing the two laughing creatures and twirling in joy. The sensation was one of completeness. Snufkin had been sent away in the mail, and sent back through a letter.
Perhaps Joxter should become a mailman one day.
