Dear Bespoke Halloween Animatronics, Ltd.,

Last week I received in the mail (nearly four months late) the custom “Mister Mummy, New Best Friend Edition” I ordered from your most recent catalog. In many ways, you nailed it: Mister Mummy’s eyes were the exact shade of yellow I specified (“Moroccan couscous”), and his arms were wrapped in the traditional white cloth bandages, just as I requested. He helps around the house and never complains. He watches Vincente Minnelli musicals with me and laughs at all the right moments. And his stories from all those centuries locked up in the pyramids have enlivened many a dinner party. A fan favorite is the one about how damned dark it could get in there as the millennia rolled by like so many falling grains of sand. Man, that kills every time (and it’s a tough crowd, let me tell you). So that’s all been awesome. Great, really. Stellar.

Be that as it may, there’s been a little bit of a problem. Mister Mummy appears to be permanently stuck on the “Liable to Move of His Own Volition in a 25-Mile Radius” setting. Now, I know, I know…I requested this function during the intake. But I did so with the conviction that the function could be turned off as necessary (for example, if he attended my son Timmy’s parent-teacher conference while I was still in the shower). Indeed, it is Mister Mummy’s persistent wanderings on this impossible-to-deactivate setting that have led me to regret both the “of its own volition” and “25-mile” elements of my request.

I won’t lie to you—at first, it was pretty fun to watch Mister Mummy hobble up and down the street. I would stand on the porch, hollering, “Later, pal! See you tonight for Negronis with the Fitzgeralds!” But soon Mister Mummy began venturing further and further out into town and, one night, he simply didn’t come home. My son Timmy and I sat there at the dinner table, staring at the cuckoo clock like a couple of schmucks while the linguine went cold. It was then that I realized that Mister Mummy didn’t feel like he had to answer to my dinner bell anymore, and that the world (that is, the world within 25 miles in any direction) was his oyster. Incidentally, I also realized that the magical scarab I had found glistening among the packing peanuts on Mister Mummy’s first day in my home was not, in fact, a “recall remote” by which I could summon him back to his waiting linguine, but rather the kind of overpriced plastic tchotchke one might find in a vending machine at Sphinx International Airport. It was about as functional as my Vizio TV remote, which is to say, not functional at all (I had to restart the whole system three times during Meet Me in St. Louis last night!)

So I lost Mister Mummy. And what’s more, I am losing my life to him. Mrs. Crabtree now cc’s me, instead of him, on Timmy’s report cards. Don from bridge club pointedly invited Mister Mummy, and not me, to join his new splinter club, “Gin Rummy with Mister Mummy” (he calls it that to add insult to injury, I suppose. Don, ladies and gentleman—always the asshole). And then there’s Timmy, who would never play catch with me—oh no, God forbid I should ever approach you with a baseball mitt, you little snot-nosed bastard! But slap a baseball cap on a walking roll of Charmin and apparently he’s as much of a father to you as the man who ejaculated you into existence twelve years ago. And speaking of my ex-wife, whom I still do see (albeit mostly through a telescope)—when I stop by her house to pick up misplaced DoorDash orders, what do I find dangling from a rhinestone on her two-penny-hooker jeans but a familiar, shall we say, Bespoke, slip of bandage.

So, there’s really no other way to say this: Mister Mummy has completely taken over my life. To tell you the truth, I was prepared to move past this dark chapter. Until this morning, that is. I was sitting in the breakfast nook admiring my bay window (which was by that point my only joy in life), when through that window crashed a construction brick that nearly decorated the opposite wall with my frontal lobe. That brick was thrown by your mummy, Bespoke Halloween Animatronics, Ltd. And, last I checked, I don’t remember selecting the “Fling a Brick at Your Owner” option on the intake form. In fact, I remember being distinctly surprised to find that option included there in the first place. Some people get off on the weirdest things (cough, cough, Don).

So now we have a problem. My social life is in tatters (bridge club is basically just me and Gladys at this point). Your Mummy is screwing my ex-wife like she’s Cleo-fucking-patra (meanwhile my sex life is about as eventful as Kevin Spacey’s acting career); my beloved bay window is as shattered as my ego; my son is forgetting my name and what I look like; and I haven’t slept this little since I got that near-fatal case of food poisoning from Couscous Palooza 2007.

So, here’s what you’re going to do, Bespoke Halloween Animatronics, Ltd., and you better not fight me on this. Tomorrow morning you and your team will send me a custom animatronic for free. But this won’t be another fucking Mister Mummy, will it? Nope, this time I want something that can END Mister Mummy. For good: no canopic jars this time. Give me something that can do some real damage, like an alien with a vaporizer set to “H-Bomb Surprise.” Or a Lithuanian zombie hunter—I hear they’re real pieces of work. At the very least, somebody with good crossbow skills. Maybe a Lara Croft Tomb Raider type—you know, some tragic yet spontaneous little hellcat who’s up for whatever, whenever, however. But I’m just spitballing here.

I’ll leave it to you to iron out the details. And while I don’t know why I am vouchsafing so much trust in a company called Bespoke Halloween Animatronics, Ltd., I can’t escape the fact that my life has been in your hands ever since I saw that damned catalog.

With any luck, I’ll get some semblance of my former life back once this new animatronic arrives. I’ll finally be able to sleep at night once Mister Mummy is writhing in agony in the shadow realm, where Anubis has been tapping his feet waiting to gnaw on his well-preserved innards since the 26th century B.C.

And maybe, just maybe, once Mister Mummy is gone, Timmy will realize that I am more than just that guy who watches Mommy through a telescope and buys Pizza Treatza Lunchables every now and again.

Don’t let me down, guys. Please. Please God. Don’t let me down.

Sent from my iPhone

By William Herff