The Postmistress of Vekllei

✿ This article was part of Vekllei’s Mail Week in February 2021

Here we have arranged the highest-ranking and lowest-ranking members of the Royal Vekllei Mail (Mail A.r.). On the left is an Office Postgirl, a precursory position tasked with distributing letters in the sprawling bureau complexes abundant in the centralised postwar period. This particular employee is Aleja Hernández, who has decided she’d rather deliver mail than spend another year studying for high school exit exams. Mail runs in her blood — her father, a Dominican, is stationed abroad in service of the Royal Mail’s Cuba Office with her mother, a native of the country. They’ll be abroad until the Spring, and by the time they get back they expect Aleja to have found full-time work with the Mail. She wears a baggy smock to keep ink and dirt off her uniform. Here, she represents a common intern of the organisation, tasked with menial and uninteresting work for a few weeks as she’s trained to be a proper Postwoman.

The difference between someone like Aleja and the Acting General Postmistress is the Postmistress does not spill letters all over the hallway.

The current General Postmistress of the country is Sious Desmesneh, who stands here beside Aleja. At 32, she is the youngest Postmistress in Vekllei’s history. She is also among the most cunningly ambitious people currently employed by the Mail, and scandalously usurped her immediate superiors to inherit the role after the passing of Postmaster John Iousasmor, a shock promotion formalised by a landslide company ballot in May last year.

It is only appropriate that she ascended via coup, since the Postmaster General is a de jure military rank, equivalent to an Admiral in the navy. The Mail is a State Requisite, not a military organ, but it retains a formal military leadership and ranked hierarchy from its origins as a military communications organ many centuries ago. Although a military “General,” Sious has no actual military powers and serves less exotically as a de facto director of the Mail A.r. She wears the Postmistress’s uniform, complete with traditional Vekllei floral plate and round heismious hat.

Finally, the flag of the Royal Mail is depicted above Aleja. Most bureau-sized organisations in Vekllei have their own flags, as part of Vekllei semaphore, and the Mail Flag is flown alongside the domestic and regional standards outside every post office in the country.