The Chain Letter

What happens when you delete an email? A modern horror short story.

This image has been generated by Gemini AI.

© 2025 Duleepa Wijayawardhana
All rights reserved. This is an original piece of fiction.
Featured in Tales under the cat tree, episode 12.

It was a Monday morning in 1996 and Sue was done. The coffee shop had given her the wrong order, her boss had handed her a full box of legal papers in the elevator, and as she sat down at her desk, she saw the note saying her desk was about to moved next to the toilet. Sue was wishing that she had claimed a sick day when the computer pinged with an incoming e-mail, the first of the day.

"This is not a joke! Open it or pay the price!" screamed the e-mail subject line. Her mouse moved purely by reflex while her mind was already throwing up in disgust and barking, "another bloody chain letter."

This one read:

Sue McLanahan! This is for real!

DO NOT DELETE THIS EMAIL!

Today you've been chosen.

As long as this message is in your inbox, nothing will happen.

But if you delete this message, the powers that be will permanently delete one electronic message every day until you die. We're serious.

Want to make double sure that never happens? Send this to five of your closest friends.

Sue snorted. A couple of faces glared from across the cubicles. She pursed her lips, and pressed the delete button.

---

Sue probably didn't notice much over the next many years, maybe not even a decade. If she had put it all together, had she ever looked back, she would have noticed the hints. A guy claimed she had refused to respond to his e-mail—which she had never seen—and that led to their breakup. But then again, he had also been a complete narcissist with a slight edge of bipolar disorder served with side dish of mushrooms.

Then there were the many missed work e-mails. Legal documents that had never arrived, unknown replies to queries, and once in a while, office memes that she seemed to be the only one left out of the loop on. Successive IT people had even given her various unflattering nicknames, though the only one that seemed to stick was "Bermuda Triangle Sue." Try as they might, and they really did try, there were no traces of the e-mails she claimed to have received or lost.

So much went unnoticed. Sue never found out about the acceptance to her dream job. She had thought the company had passed her by. There was at least one apartment she had coveted for which she never saw the approval. Of course, not everything was negative. She also never received the angry e-mail from the downstairs neighbor when she had played 12 hours of Gotye's "Somebody That I Used to Know" on repeat during one breakup-fueled, ice-cream-binge-eating session that lasted till 3 a.m.

After a while, Sue had decided she was just not cut out for this purely electronic world. If the problems had only stuck to e-mail, she might have coped. But the problems stretched to instant messaging apps and social media. Her world was one now where she had a system for filing every important message in at least three or four different places and several different flash drives, and her house was piled high with printed e-mails. Her cubicle resembled a patchwork quilt of Post-it notes that only she could decipher.

Perhaps the final nail was the court case where she lost the e-mail evidence of which there was only a single copy. Or perhaps it was the many complaints from her co-workers that she now resembled a disheveled crone muttering to herself. Or perhaps it was her inordinate expenses on the printer. Whatever the reason, the day finally came when her boss had enough and referred her to therapy.

The psychiatrist's recommendation was insistent that she receive specialized treatment away from society: "Sue McLanahan suffers from an obsessive-compulsive disorder surrounding electronic documents and an irrational fear of items in her life being deleted."

After months away, she emerged from her therapy cocoon free from dark circles around her eyes. Her psychiatrist's release papers stated: "Sue McLanahan can return to work after a much-needed holiday to complement the wonderful success of the therapy. We suggest somewhere warm, sunny, and out of the country!"

So it was that a tanned Sue returned home. Wearing a loud dress and a brilliant smile, she stepped in front of the immigration officer at the airport ready to take on the world. The officer's eyes kept darting between Sue's face, her passport, and his computer.

"Ma'am, who are you?"

"Sue. Susan McLanahan. Like it says on my passport."

"Ma'am, I need you to step this way. I know what your passport says, but as far as I can see, you don't exist in the computer system. Exactly who are you?"