Postcard Stories

Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania

I met Noah on a bench, waiting for the bus into town. He was a jittery man – all nervous energy – scraping at his cuticles with his fingernails.

That day, I remember, was colder than usual for the Fall in Pennsylvania.

In hindsight, I remember his appearance was not unlike Ichabod Crane from the animated The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. There was something alarming about him, something desperate, something not-quite-right, something wild eyed. He was the kind of chatter-mouth who is encouraged to continue by not getting up, and walking away.

He’d been heartbroken, he explained. He had been done wrong by an ex-girlfriend of his. This woman, named Cassandra, was larger than he, and pretty, with straight black hair down along her shoulders.

“She was the only love that I could fit in my heart,” he said.

I kept my eyes fixed on the Pocono Record spread across my lap, but he continued. Cassandra lived out in the suburbs somewhere, far out, near the woods; a place that I’d been to before, but which sounded bleaker and darker when channeled through Noah’s mind.

He’d been working, after all, as an apprentice at a taxidermy studio – a small, square, barn in the same woods.

One day he’d left work early, and had gone to surprise Cassandra. This was a mistake. He walked in to find her in bed with a local convenient store clerk named Tiller. Noah was shocked. He screamed and yelled, and Tiller fled the scene, grabbing his clothes as he tore half-naked through the apartment.

Cassandra explained to him that she was sorry, that it was stupid of her, that it was meaningless.

“It broke me,” he said. “Nothing felt right after that.”

Later that week, she tried to explain that it was through sleeping with Tiller that she was finally able to see how good Noah was to her, that she was glad their transgressions had occurred, because now she could see so clearly that it was he that she wanted.

He forgave Cassandra. He forgave her, and trusted in her promise that she would never do anything like this again.

“She told me she’d learned, and I believed her,” he said.

A month later, he was in her  kitchen eating breakfast before he went into work. Her laptop was open on the kitchen counter, and he heard a cash register sound effect. He glanced over at the computer, and saw that she’d received an email. Her Hotmail inbox was open. He didn’t mean to snoop, but it was right in front of him. The email said it all; she was still seeing Tiller and was planning to run off with him to Nebraska where he’d gotten a job offer. Crushed, Noah returned to his studio, and poured his sorrows into his work. That only lasted a few days however. He couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Instead of taking her back, however, Noah reacted in a way that surprised him. He told me it was a deep anger.

“Something was building inside me,” he said.

“What was?” I asked, setting down my newspaper.

“I don’t know, but I felt volatile. I felt evil. I was so hurt and angry. And I needed to do something drastic to satiate it.”

He mulled it over and over. He spent nights pacing along the dusty corridors of recently stuffed animals in the studio; upright bears, foxes, deer, rodents. An industrial lamp swung from high above, causing dark animal shadows to grow and shrink along the aluminum siding of the barn.

He’d been ignoring Cassandra’s calls, texts, emails. He hadn’t spoken to her in days. She’d even come by his apartment, for two night’s in a row, but he’d shut the lights off, and sat in the dark – ignoring her knocks on the door.

At the end of the week, he was alone in his studio. He came to an epiphany while staring at the ferocious teeth of a massive Pocono black bear.

“I knew what I needed to do,” he said.

Noah went into action. He heaved the large doors of the barn open, letting in the thick cold of the night. The surrounding woods were calm and dark. Trees swayed in anticipation of a storm-front winds that was about to blow through. He ran around the side of the barn, and hopped into the company van. He backed the van up to the open barn doors and began loading animal, after animal inside.

“Fittingly, it was my own little taxidermized Noah’s arc.”

Once the van was sufficiently loaded, he headed out onto the back roads towards Cassandra’s apartment. She lived in a small neighborhood, consisting primarily of duplexes. The lights were on when he arrived, and he killed his headlights, and watched two figures through the opaque curtain covering the large living room window. He saw them, Cassandra and Tiller, walking hand in hand out to her car in the driveway.

Once they’d driven off, Noah backed up the van into the driveway, and hurried up to the front door.

My bus arrived at this moment. I blew warmth into my gloved hands and stepped up onto the steps and inside. It smelled like urine. Noah, caught anxiously in the middle of his story, took off up the steps after me. Together we sat in the back of the nearly empty bus. I rarely acknowledged him, preferring to keep my eyes fixed out of the bus window, but he continued, unselfconsciously.

The front door had been locked, but Noah found the key under the front mat, and was soon inside. It was dark and filled with memories.

“It was unbelievably painful,” he said. “My mind was racing, because I knew I’d crossed a threshold. I couldn’t go back from this. We all daydream revenge stories, but here I was actually acting mine out.” He said it was a strong feeling, akin to the wave of unease upon walking into an abandoned hospital.

He propped open the door, and began loading the animals into the apartment. He placed the bear in the corner of the room by the TV set, and several deer around the living room. He placed the rodents under furniture, and threw a squirrel under the sheets of her bed.

“I wanted to damage her,” he said. “I wanted to damage her with fright. I almost hoped to kill her. I wanted her to forever fear walking into darkened rooms.”

After a half hour the animals – all sixteen of them – were set up around the apartment. He turned the lights out and fled.

Later that night, the police arrived at his door. Handcuffs were thrown around his wrists and he was forced into a squad car.

I finally turned to Noah, and asked him why he did what he did.

“Weren’t you listening?”

“No, I mean why do you work in taxidermy?” I asked. I looked down at my watch. I was now late for work.

“I don’t know. It’s better than flipping burgers” he said.

My stop came and I said goodbye. As I walked along the aisle, I took a final glance back at Noah, who was looking out the window in quiet desperation. He tore at his nails with his teeth. He hopped up, and stopped me.

“Animals – stuffed ones – don’t judge you. They’re empty inside. Empty and yet immortalized. It’s why I do the work I do. That’s why I like it.”

“Good luck, Noah,” I said.

I walked off the bus and around the back of the restaurant where I work. I changed into my work clothes in a bathroom stall, and hurried out to begin my shift on the floor.

I never saw him again.

Postcard: Found at Stagecoach Antiques in Akron, OH in November 2011.

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

He walked in from the street, and brushed the snow off his overcoat, his eyes down on his phone, sunglasses across his face. He stomped out his shoes. and smiled up at the receptionist standing at a podium.

He strode up.

“Welcome to Gallerie LeMieux,” she said. She looked at him in a peculiar way and offered him a brochure. She wore dark bangs and thick-rimmed glasses.

He noticed immediately. “No accent,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t have an accent.”

“Oh, I grew up in the states,” she said. “Colorado.”

“Have we met before?” he asked, after a pause.

“I don’t believe so, though it’s possible. Where are you from?”

“New York City.”

“We could have met at our sister gallery in the Meat Packing District?”

“I don’t think it was there,” he said. “Oh well.”

A polite pause lingered over the moment. He removed his sunglasses.

“Anyway, I’m a collector. I came up for a meeting, but scheduled an extra day to look around.”

He’d said the magic word. The woman leaned into the podium and handed him a pricing list along with a flute of champagne.

“On the house,” she said. “My name is Charlotte. Let me know if you need any help.”

He thanked her, and walked in.

He moved on the balls of his feet, his hands curled a brochure behind his back. Tall white walls surrounded him on all sides. The lighting was clinical. The only sounds were hushed whispers into ears, or the echoing clicks of high-heels. Preston looked at several of the works, which were modern, largely minimalist, and striking.

He stopped at one piece – a mirror – with the words YOU LIE scribbled in lipstick. He leaned in and looked at himself. He ran his fingers back through his hair, across his stubble and chuckled his “chuckle;” the “chuckle” he’d carried with him through thirty-seven years of affluence and good fortune. He rather liked this one – predictably vain as he could be – and checked the pricing as he walked into the next room.

He raised his head finally, assuredly and was met with another framed mirror. He walked towards it however, he tilted his head to the side and the mirrored image remained in place.

“What a wonderful illusion!” he exclaimed to a long-legged woman next to him. She double-took the painting with her eyes and offered her glass towards him. They clinked.

“It’s a pleasure monsieur,” she said to his amusement as she walked on.

Something felt off. He leaned in, with the realization that the “mirror” was not a mirror at all, but an elaborately detailed painting of an uncanny and astoundingly accurate likeness of himself. The model, whoever they’d been, had his same features; slender nose, thick eyebrows, masculine jaw, smirk.

He stepped back with a mixed expression of uncomfortable strangeness. Yet what a boost to one’s ego it is, he thought, to be hung on a wall in a gallery, to be displayed proudly and accurately – to be immortalized!

He felt confident, esteemed. He looked over at the next painting, a much larger canvas this time. In this one, he was seated in a penthouse apartment on a large leather couch holding a television remote in his hand, everything painted in meticulous photo-realistic authenticity. An internal alarm brimmed inside him. His stomach dipped. The apartment in the painting was his own.

He staggered back and sat on a small wooden bench in the center of the room. The details were all there up on the gallery wall in the right proportions.

He was scared to keep looking, but he turned and saw the naked ankles of the next painting. It was a nude. His bedroom was modern, with a slanted ceiling and a walk-out balcony. It was, without doubt, his own. In the painting, he slid nakedly out of the bed while an alluring, bare breasted, woman sat back against the headboard with her hands in her hair. At that moment, tip-toeing between repulsion and deja-vu, he remembered that very morning. Sophia was her name, he was sure. Yes, Sophia, the model from London.

He stood up. His shoes clattered across the floor.

“The paintings in the back?” he asked to the startled receptionist, keeping his voice at gallery level. “Don’t even tell me you don’t see what’s going on here?”

“Is there a problem, monsieur?” she said.

He stepped back, and box-framed his head between his hands to her perplexed look.

“I still don’t understand?”

He shook his head.

“I want to know who painted those paintings.”

“Which paintings?”

“The paintings in the back?”

“Are you interested to buy?”

“I’m interested in why it is me that is featured in them?”

“You’re saying that you are painted into the paintings?”

“He’s a sick voyeur, whoever painted them. Who’s responsible?”

“A French artist, sir, Jacques de Monfreid.”

“All the details are there. He painted me. He painted my life. My apartment in New York. That’s me up on those canvases!”

“I’m sorry sir, but no. I’m afraid you’re mistaken.”

“No that can’t be. That can’t be. It’s me. I know it is.”

He led the receptionist into the back room of the gallery, much to her irritation. He gestured to the paintings and then back at himself. The receptionist looked them over.

“I see what you mean. There’s a resemblance, but I think you are over-reacting. It is obviously not you. There’s no way.

“How do you know for sure?”

“Monsieur de Monfreid died in the late 1980s. This series was painted in Paris.” She stepped forward, to confirm with the adjacent placard on the wall. “In the summer of 1984.”

“You’re positive?”

“I am, sir.”

She turned back around and left.

He sat on the bench for the rest of the afternoon, obsessing over the details in the paintings. A rush of strange thoughts came to him then. He’d never felt more exposed, but he soon felt something else. Something stronger, in a way, something perpetual.

Gallery hopper’s came and went through the day, there were a number of familiar nods and smiles.

He began to feel a prickle of perverse excitement at the constant recognition. He felt appreciated, and enjoyed his newfound minor celebrity. The longer he stared, though, the less the paintings began to resemble himself. He noticed the minute differences and began to falter when remembering the exact details of Sophia from London.

“It was Sophia, right?” he thought aloud.

He bought the paintings before leaving Montreal, and the entire series was hanging on the walls of his New York penthouse within a week. By night he would walk through his apartment and linger in front of each one, for he was having an increasingly difficult time looking away.

Postcard: Found at the Melrose Trading Post in Los Angeles, CA in October 2011.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Olinda moved to Cambridge with no real plan other than to sit on milk-crate furniture for most of June and wait for Jack to get back.

She arrived on a bus late one night, downtown. It was warm that night and the back of her t-shirt was soaked in sweat. She took one of the final trains of the night over the river to Cambridge.

The apartment was completely bare and simple; a railroad-style one bedroom. The walls were cream white, and covered in a series of tiny holes from where paintings and photographs from the previous tenants had been hung. Wooden slats covered the floor, groaning under the weight of each step. It was stuffy, despite the open windows. There was a flat-wooden work table in the corner of the room with a broken computer chair, which sat far too low to the ground. On the table was a woolen blanket, a pillow.

The first thing Olinda did was undo her suitcase and remove a calendar. She ripped June out of it – “Afghan Dogs” – and taped it on the wall.

She reached in and took a telephone from her backpack and plugged it into the wall.

She sat on the floor, rosy cheeked, wiping the dribbles of sweat from her hairline. She detached a sleeping pad from a clip on the side of her backpack and put her lips to the nozzle until it was inflated and firm. She looked at the Afghan on the wall, smiling at its sublime, dumb, open mouth. She wanted one of her own, to take into parks and on walks someday.

On warm nights that month she would sit out on the fire escape and watch the glowing images from her neighbors TV across the street.

And during the day she would walk. Olinda would walk for miles, across the campuses, in and out of bookstores and libraries, and along the Charles.

He called late one night. “Sorry, I wasn’t sure about the time difference,” he said. His voice sounded much different when long distance, over the telephone.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“How’s the place treating you?”

“It’s great,” she said twirling her hair, balanced on one foot, her elbow holding her up against the wall.

“I think about you every day.”

“I think about you too. Did you go to Angkor Wat?”

“That’s Cambodia. I’m in Bangkok now.”

“Yeah, but did you go when you were there?”

“I told you I was going to be really busy, Olinda. I didn’t get a chance. We’re meeting with some developers today. This place is crazy. The traffic is really bad.”

“Be safe.”

“What?”

“Be safe!”

“I can’t hear you, sorry. I’m on a company phone.”

He hung up.

Olinda put the phone down and stepped out through the window onto the fire escape. She took a Ziploc out of her pants pocket and slipped a cigar out of it. She flipped her zippo open and sat with her back against the wall, leaning the pre-cut cigar into the flame. Her eyes watching the large screen TV from the open window across the street. She took several puffs and blew the smoke into the air.

“Mind if I join you?” said a voice from somewhere underneath her. She opened her legs, and saw a scrawny fire-headed young man peering up at her, palming a pack of cigarettes. She waved him up and her scurried up the fire escape. He was awkward looking, not particularly attractive. He had two crooked teeth and smiled like an idiot, she thought. His jeans were rolled up at the ankles like he’d been wading through a creek all day, and he wore a dirty white t-shirt with the word “college” written in sharpie. He put his hand out, and sat cross-legged next to her. “Ricky,” he said. He had a  jittery demeanor, like he was constantly suppressing impulses to speak or move.

“What kind of a name is Olinda?” he said after sucking down on the cigarette, way too fast.

“It’s a city in Brazil.”

“You’re Brazilian.”

“No. My mom is Portuguese, but grew up in Seattle. She and my Dad were planning to go on a vacation in Olinda when she found out she was pregnant with me. They never ended up going, though.”

“Philosophy.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what you’re studying, isn’t it? My Dad works at Haaahvard. I’ve got a talent for guessing majors.”

“I’m not in school. I’m here because my boyfriend just moved here. How old are you, anyway?”

Ricky looked in through the window, at the hollow apartment. “You guys like minimalists or something?” Olinda finally cracked, she laughed in his direction. “He’s not gonna pummel me for sitting here with you, is he?”

“No, nobody’s going to pummel you.”

“Well that’s good.”

“He’s in Cambodia, Jack. Actually, Thailand. He’s doing business there. He just got this place, but won’t be back for a few weeks.”

Ricky put out his cigarette, then stood up. “My friends are playing a show this weekend. You should come.” He pushed a flyer in front of her. “It’s right close to here, off of Mass Ave. They’re good. Kind of funky rock music, with a sax player. See you there if you wanna come.” He began heading back down. “I’m twenty-two by the way.” And slipped back in through the window.

Olinda looked across the street. George W. Bush was speaking at a podium on television, she could see his mouth moving, but the TV was on mute. She put out the cigar and went back inside.

That night she sat over the stove-top, heating up a pot-full of Kidney beans, and pouring cheese and onion slivers over top. She wanted to call Jack, but didn’t know what time it was over there. She could have calculated it, but she didn’t.

She walked by the venue twice that Saturday, debating on whether to go in. It was loud and the walls seemed to be expanding out onto the street, overflowing with twenty-somethings sweating through their bandannas and sleeveless shirts. The building walls were covered in graffiti, and there were bright yellow awnings hanging down over the sidewalk from the roof. Everyone was talking loudly outside, smoking, their hearing sufficiently damaged for the night.

“You are Olinda from Washington. You’re friendly and have a lot of interesting things to say,” she thought to herself.

She walked up to the door and bought a ticket.

Ricky sat alone in a side booth. He cupped a beer in his hands, lost in thought, and watched the band bobbing up and down to the funky beat on-stage. Olinda got a drink, and walked over and sat down across from him. He perked up when she sat. They yelled across the table at one another, but neither could hear one another, except for the ten seconds in between songs, when they would try and fire off as much information back and forth as they can.

After a few more drinks, and a series of similar sounding songs, Olinda stepped out of the booth and onto the dance floor. She shimmied left and right to the beat and threw a smile in his direction. He sipped down the remainder of his drink and accompanied her, throwing out finger-guns in both directions. Olinda twisted as Ricky mimicked her movements, a few feet away. Lights spattered the audience, smoke shot out from the corners of the stage.

For the first time since moving to Cambridge, she felt good.

Much later in the night, after the concert, they walked along Massachusetts Avenue, heading in the direction of the river. They didn’t say much, their ears still ringing from the show. Olinda kept yawning to pop her ears. She worried that the ringing wouldn’t ever leave. Becoming something she’d have to live with. She thought of obese bearded characters in silent movies, leaning in, twisting an ear-horn in their ear to listen to whoever was speaking. This thought made her giggle.

“What’s so funny?” asked Ricky.

She told him and he laughed.

“What’s the one sense you could live without?”

“Isn’t that disrespectful of people who do live without a sense?”

“I couldn’t live without my hearing,” he said.  “I couldn’t live with myself knowing that there is music in the world, and that I wouldn’t ever be able to hear it again. What would the point in that be?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure what sense I could live without.”

“What is it that you want to do with your life?”

She remained silent. It was the question Olinda dreaded most. But not that she didn’t have an answer.

“I have to pee,” said Ricky when they got to the river. “Don’t look.”

He ran up in front of a wide tree, lining the river. It was quiet, and empty. She sat on a bench and waiting, looking out at the buildings across the river. From behind the tree, she heard his voice. “What do you want to do with your life, Olinda?” he called out. She could see the arc of pee shooting out from behind the tree over the edge, and turned away blushing.

“I want to write poetry,” she said, after a moment.

“What?” he called out from behind the tree.

Ricky walked back around finally, with a bound in his step.

“Poetry,” she said.

“Not much money in that.”

“I don’t think – it’s not really about the money.”

“You’re parents are well off,” he said with a smirk, and sat down next to her on the bench.

“That’s kind of rude.”

“It’s true though, huh?”

“Not my parents, but Jack is. Said he can support me while I try and get started. He’s been in his business a long time now. Once he finalizes things with Sandra, things will better and we can fully move on.”

“How did you two meet?” he asked. “Don’t take offense, but you seem like an odd match.”

She paused, her mouth opened and closed. “We met online,” she said, finally.

Ricky leaned in, and put his hand on her knee. Her eyes went wide, like window-shutters opening. She brushed his hand off, neither saying anything afterward. A heavy subtext hung now over their small-talk. It was thick like humidity.

“You like ice-cream?” he said, standing. “I work at a store we can walk to. I’ve got the keys to the back. I can grab us some.”

“You’re really going to play that off like it didn’t just happen?”

“I was hoping to, yeah.”

“Well that’s not fair.”

“Yeah, sorry. It’s not. I don’t know what that was about.”

Olinda walked back home that night, alone, leaving Ricky by the river.

She tried to call Jack when she returned, but he didn’t answer. She sat on a milk-crate and ate some left-over beans out of the pot in the fridge. They were cold and she felt sour, and lonely.

She sat at the desk and begin sketching out a new poem, but felt distracted. After awhile, she got tired and lay down on her sleeping mat, but couldn’t get comfortable. It was surprisingly cold at this time of night, for this time of year. She got up and tried calling Jack again, but nobody answered.

She looked up at the wall, at her calendar. A wild tongued Afghan ran with its fur distorted, in weird ripples, heading directly toward the camera of whoever had taken the picture. It looked blissed out and wonderful. She wondered what it thought it was chasing, what was on the other side of the photo. She wanted to picture that all that was behind the photo was a rabbit running out into a field, but she knew that there was a camera crew, and a guy pacing in the background, on a cell-phone, yelling for more money, and two severe women in scarves standing behind a series of lights, and another guy holding a reflector to redirect the sunlight, and the dog ran oblivious over and over again at the whistle of a hired trainer. She wished all of this wasn’t true. She’d never felt more alone. She heard the television from across the street, reverberating between the buildings. She wrapped the blanket up around her and sometime around then she must have fallen asleep.

Her ears still rang when she woke.

Two months later Olinda saw Ricky when Jack walked her in to the ice-cream store.

Jack wore leather gloves, and ushered her in under his arm. They made eyes through the glass partition, and Ricky offered them samples of chocolate pecan. Neither acknowledged the pretense.

Jack got a call, handed her some money, and stepped outside. Olinda saw him on the side-walk. Ricky leaned in, while she paid for the ice-cream.

“I’m really sorry about that time by the river,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“No, I mean it was uncalled for and –”

“– I said don’t worry about it.” She took a quick glance over her shoulder, toward Jack pacing across the sidewalk yelling into his phone. “It was nothing.”

That night Olinda couldn’t sleep. She slipped out of bed, onto the fire-escape, and went down to the window below.

She tapped lightly on the window, and felt like a creep, but saw a figure moving toward her. His hair was messy and his eyes were squinting. He opened the window, and poked his head through.

“What’s up?” he said. He looked surprised to see her crouching there.

She leaned in and put her hand behind his head. She lowered herself, putting her lips on his, and rolled back on her heels.

“What was that about?” he said when they separated.

“Touch,” she said.

“What?”

“I never answered you that night. Touch is the sense I couldn’t live without.”

She looked at Ricky. She felt embarrassed and unsure. She stood up, and moved back up the ladder, in through her window and was gone. Ricky stood there, confounded, then ducked back inside closing his window.

Back in the apartment, Olinda pulled the milk-crate out of the closet and placed it back against the wall. The rest of the apartment was now fully furnished. In the closet, she also noticed the ripped out calendar page for June. She walked it over and tacked it up on the wall. She sat and waited under the calendar – knowing she wouldn’t sleep tonight – for when Jack would get up and leave for work.

That morning, Jack walked in efficiently. He nodded toward the calendar.

“Wrong month babe,” he said snugging a tie up against his neck. Olinda turned around from the stove-top, a skillet of eggs sizzling out in front of her.

“I know, I just like the picture,” she said, placing the skillet back on the stove.

Postcard: Found at the Melrose Trading Post in Los Angeles, CA in October 2011.