Postcard Stories

Chattanooga, Tennessee

I saw a dead body once. We were on a family vacation, heading south.

My brother and I sat in the back of the van, watching cartoons on a travel TV that was secured in place, between the front seats, by bungee cables.

We’d taken our shirts off in the heat, and were perspiring, loud, and rude. We fought. We insulted. We slapped, and pinched and punched. We jammed saliva covered fingers into one another’s ears and gave out Indian rug burns. We made flatulent noises by tucking our hands under our sweaty armpits and flapping our arms. We wrote curse words on a notepad - ones we were too afraid to say in front of our parents - and threatened to beat each other “into pulp.” My brother was older than me, and bigger then, but I tried to overcompensate with the sting of my words.

Dad rolled down the window. We heard patrol sirens whining, distant chops of an idling helicopter. Something was wrong. You could just feel it, like nausea or hot sun on your arm.

Nobody seemed to know or care why we’d stopped. Some people left their cars, danced to radios, or chased each other in circles. Others darted off into the woods to urinate. One long haired man hopped out of his van holding a lawn chair. I watched him run ahead a hundred yards or so, plop down, crack a beer, and wait for his ride to catch up.

We inched ahead.

Eventually, we reached the accident. Shards of metal and glass were scattered everywhere. A sheen of oils and hose-water glistened on the blacktop, reminding me of the time my brother busted the fish tank in Ms. Carl’s second grade classroom.

At some point, traffic began to slow. Cars were lined up, bumpers kissing bumpers, as far, and straight, as any of us could see. The first car was completely smashed in. The hood was bent upward, and the windows all blown out; a crumpled, glossy, magazine picture of a car. A crew of paramedics and firemen circled around it.

The other car was off in the woods that bordered the highway, barely visible, wrapped around a tree.

My brother was the first to see the body. We rolled by it slowly, stuck in the tedious pull of traffic. He pointed at the white sheet lain delicately on the road.

“Don’t look, boys don’t look,” said my Dad, in a tone I don’t think I’d ever heard before. “Close your eyes.”

There was nowhere else to look.

I didn’t recognize what it was at first. All I felt at the time was confusion. Why was this person resting on the blacktop? My god, how hot they must have been! How sweaty and uncomfortable it must be under there. I was concerned. Did anybody realize they were there? Someone was going to run them over! Why wasn’t anyone doing anything?

I fished through the bottom of our Igloo cooler and grabbed a bottle of water.

“You should give this to that person,” I said, passing it up to my Mom. “What person?” she asked. “There’s somebody under that sheet.” Mom took the drink, but didn’t respond.

“You moron,” said my brother as he flicked the back of my ear. He seemed almost delighted. “That person under there is dead. They’re cooking like a steak on a skillet and –”

“Christopher!” said my Mom. I could see the bottle trembling in her hands.

I looked back and saw a hand reaching outward, from underneath the sheet. It had five fingers and unpainted nails – a man, I assumed – just like mine, just like my hand.

Dad remained silent, staring forward into the rear-window of the car ahead of us. Two oblivious children, bowl-cut, in matching overalls, pulled their mouths back with their fingers, making faces, waving.

None of us said much after that. We cleared through the traffic and resumed our usual speed on the highway. We returned to our thoughts, our TV.

At a picnic table in Chattanooga, a few hours later, my Dad pointed up at a mountain off in the distance. “Let’s go up there,” he said, nodding with his chin, while dipping a tear of grilled cheese into a styrofoam cup of soup. “Let’s see what it’s like at the top.”

Mom nodded, chewing, looking out and away.

We parked at the base of the mountain, and a cable car took us up the side. It was steep and felt like a roller coaster, ratcheting up to that first drop. I felt a stab inside my stomach. I imagined us reaching the top and sliding all the way down the other side, flipping and rolling – I thought suddenly of the car in the woods along the highway – into Chattanooga, uprooting plants and trees, crushing pedestrians, tearing through the windows of buildings, out through their back walls like an exit wound. I felt guilty and weird for thinking this way. I wanted to go back home.

We reached the top of the mountain. We could see forever, it seemed.

“Seven states,” said Dad, flipping through his annotated guide book. “It says you can see seven different states from here, on a clear day.”

I tried to imagine that I could see them, all seven, but it was cloudy and everything looked the same from this height. I couldn’t distinguish one state from the other. The sameness was overwhelming. All I could see were the same trees, rooftops, baseball diamonds, cars, fields of green, and the little moving specks that I assumed were people.

I could also see the network of roads, like the gray spidery veins that ran down my mother’s bare legs, which scared me to the point of closing my eyes. For I knew that if I opened them, I could trace the roads back to the scene of the crash.

My brother stepped up behind me and I flinched, waiting for another flick against the ear, or a tennis shoe to the back of my thigh, but he said nothing, did nothing. He looked out with the rest of us and remained silent.

It was getting near dusk when we returned to the van – which was cooler now – and drove off into the night.

We stopped at a roadside motel, later, to sleep. I couldn’t, however.

And while I tossed and turned – pacing, at times, around the darkened room – the rest of my family slept well. So well, that they remained asleep in the glow of a muted news program, which replayed footage from the crash site over and over – as if their nightmares were projecting outward from their minds, across their foreheads, faces.

I don’t think I dreamed of the crash though, once I finally fell asleep. In fact, I don’t even remember what I dreamed of that night.

Postcard: Found at Antiques of Old Wilmington in Wilmington, North Carolina in January 2012.

Wiesbaden, Germany

If I would have known that she was going to be on the flight, I would never have boarded and would still be alive.

I leaned my head into the curve of the window, watching New York disappear underneath the flying tube. The Manhattan skyline jutted upward, like a three-dimensional pop-up book, and we sliced through the cloud cover as the air-pressure pushed against my cheekbones. The plane was crowded, but silent. Passengers leaned back against their seats, meditative and placid, pretending to sleep.

We barreled forward. We were on schedule to be in Germany by morning. The sun wrestled through the thick patches of clouds. A plane shaped object glided across the glistening surface below. A shadowy ghost-ship crossing the Atlantic.

An old man with shaking hands looked up at me from the first aisle seat of the plane and smiled. I was fixing coffee in the kitchenette as he spoke. “I lost my virginity on a flight in 1949,” he said. I nodded. He motioned me toward him. “I was younger then.”

“I’m sure you were,” I said.

“And she was a Radio City Rockette! With all the poise you’d expect from a dancer. But this one was wild. We made love in the bathroom of the plane, before we hit a patch of turbulence.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I need you to be more discreet,” I said, in response to the stern expressions coming from my superior, Linda.

“And in the turbulence I fell away from the half-naked Rockette, and backward through the bathroom door.”

“Sir, there are children nearby. I need you to please be quiet.”

“I landed in the aisle with my pants around my ankles, scrambling to pull ‘em back up. Never been scared of a flying since.”

I took the coffee pot and moved away, down the aisle, toward the end of the plane. I saw Jeannie seated along the aisle, her light hair loose over her shoulders, and her eyes closed. My stomach lurched, as if the plane had dipped back under the cloud. I hurried past her and straight into the bathroom at the back of the plane.

“Are you sick, Sean?” asked Linda through the bathroom door as I hid, hoping to delay the inevitable.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“What’s the matter with you today? You need to get your head in the game.”

I heard her walk on, and downed the three mini rum bottles I’d swiped from the rear storage cabinets.

I calmed down, while perched on the closed lid of the toilet, and thought of Jeannie and I on the beach in Nice that weekend together. Our feet slipping along the jagged rocks, holding hands, lowering into the water. I’d held her wet body against mine as we kissed in the gentle lap of the Mediterranean. I thought of walking along the streets that night, dream-like, along the cobblestones. We sat eating snow-cones on the steps of a church, watching the shadow of a disheveled busker shiver into his guitar, along the walls of an apartment building. He crooned and his voice echoed through the deserted town square. I could see the uncut strings from his guitar dangling out from his shadow, like antennae. The street lamps began to flick on, pushing back the enclosing blanket of darkness overhead. Jeannie leaned up into my shoulder and told me about her life back in Massachusetts and how it’s easy to fall in love when you’re somewhere new and transient and away from the tedium of everyday life.

“This isn’t real,” she’d said. I nodded, but didn’t know what she meant then. She turned and put her lips against mine. “We can’t.”

I shook off the memory, and opened the door to the face of Jeannie. “I saw you when I boarded,” she said.. She grabbed my palm and pulled me into the back kitchenette before I realized what was happening. “You can’t say anything, Sean. You and I never existed. There is no you and I. I don’t know you. Got it?”

“This isn’t fair,” I choked out. She shook her head professionally to the side, and hurried back down the aisle away and leaned back into her seat.

I went after her, and when I reached the seat, I saw the dark haired man seated next to her, his hand on her shoulder, his eyes scanning a magazine. Her look pleaded for me to leave, but I couldn’t move. I hovered above the row waiting for something to happen. Ironically, considering what would happen later, I wished for the plane to nosedive. The man noticed, and cleared his throat.

“Vodka tonic, my good man,” he said. I blinked and remained frozen and awkward. “Vodka tonic?”

I went into the back and sloshed the liquids together in a glass. I skimped him on booze. It was my own petty rebellion.

The overhead lights dimmed, as passengers people pulled complimentary blankets over their immobile bodies. There’s nothing lonelier than working an airplane by night, I thought, surrounded by sleeping passengers, as they rest in the dark of the cabin, tens of thousands of miles in the air. I returned to their row and handed the dark haired man his drink. He nodded and accepted with headphones on, and turned toward the window, looking out. A light on the end of the wing blinked, like a lethargic strobe light, illuminating the thick pillow of clouds surrounding us.

“Go away,” she whispered, throwing nervous glances at her oblivious husband.

“You told me you loved me that weekend,” I spit through my teeth.

“I was confused. People make mistakes when they’re traveling. They create delusions that anything is possible.”

I stormed off, and thought of those sleepless nights following our weekend together. I thought of sitting in my apartment in Astoria, in front of my laptop, as each email bounced back into my inbox with a non-delivery report. I tried so many variations, but none worked. I held the scrap of paper, the one she’d passed me with a smirk as we’d boarded the flight back to the states, in my hand each night. It was all I had left of Jeannie.

It didn’t occur to me until a week later that she’d given me a fake.

I sulked the rest of the flight, until we’d cleared into the first yawns of the morning glow. I glanced out, noticing a patch of black clouds that loomed ahead. Passengers began to awaken, like sleepy children, and stretch in their seats.

The old man had noticed my discontent, and pulled me in to speak to him closely. “If you can’t change things, then stir them up,” he’d advised behind a glossy-eyed grin. I wasn’t entirely sure if he was awake or not. I’d practiced my speech in my head for hours, and stood up in the front of the plane with the intercom pressed against my lips.

“I have an announcement,” I said. My voice buzzed against the speakers throughout the plane. Several passengers opened their confused eyes, looking around the darkened cabin. “There’s a passenger on board named Jeannie Laurent who –”

The turbulence hit.

The engine churned underneath like tires spinning in mud. The plane began to rumble and convulse. The seatbelt lights chimed on. Linda ran up and grabbed the intercom out of my hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen please remain calm,” she said, with the soothing voice of a kindergarten teacher.

The plane dropped. The air pressure was unreal and painful. The cabin air smelled suddenly like vomit. The passengers screamed and clambered and climbed their seats and tore out into the aisles, and threw their drinks, and dashed back and forth, but had no where to go. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling, but nobody bothered to attach them. There was a loud screech from outside the plane. We were dropping at a fantastic speed and everything began to blur.

And I never got to finish my speech, or speak to Jeannie again, because we’d crashed into the German countryside – somewhere near Wiesbaden – and everything she and I had together, and everything we ever knew to be true and real, didn’t matter anymore.

Postcard: Found at the Downtown Emporium in Peninsula, OH in November 2011.