Postcards Were Paper

I rummage for postcards, write small pieces of original fiction on them, and then mail them to real people! I love the idea of the internet bringing us back to things we can actually touch- real paper, real hands, real awful penmanship and spelling. Cheers, I'd love to mail you a piece! If you'd like a piece, Ask me Stuff or send an email to [email protected]

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Well, folks, it's certainly been a while since the internet and I cut a rug, but I'm cooking up a Christmas waltz. Get ready for a little series of yuletide fiction and memoir, set to brighten your dashboard and shake your jingle bells. Thanks for staying tuned!

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This came in the mail a few weeks ago, made by fellow tumblr(er?) Zen Bbq http://zenbbq.tumblr.com/  If you are a fan of prolific creativity, you'd like this.

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The venue, if you can call it that, is stuffed with people holding their coats. There is no coat check, or space for a corner pile. It’s an artist’s loft, and the easels, sheets, and wheels are pushed to the parameters. The garage door style window is rusty, so it’s propped open with a few paperbacks. This allows a slice of winter air to hit the knees of about three people. Thea stands in the middle, between a shaved head and a half shaved head, and hates the band, and hates the crowd more. Everyone seems so unappealing that she begins to wonder if she has ever been a nice person. A guttural baseline repeats itself, and her mouth twists into a grimace, a devil grin that could only hide in an unlit crowd. She pictures two black thorns splitting through her temples, as though her expression has pushed them from dormancy. She imagines the horns, waiting behind her eyes, tucked inside her skull, until this moment. The band screams on, boring, boring, boring. The crowd bobs along, a projector flashes bird wings and bare trees over the musicians, layering them in a kind of mountain geometry. Thea thinks maybe ‘mountain geometry’ is giving them too much credit. She wonders who would judge her for hating this band, or blame her for hurting these people. In the press of elbows and armpits, she grows alone, a lost shadow over a miniature moment, a lost sound in a thrashing town.

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It’s so hard to take pictures of spider web. If it’s dry,or in a forest, or both, you might as well forget it. Even when it’s covered in dew, a heavy beaded rosette of snapshot potential, you end up with a mashed image needing an explanation.

"There, you can see it- it was perfect." 

You’ll say this, tracing the spiral on your print, or more likely, your screen, because no one holds images in thier hands anymore. 

If this were a spider circus trick, it could be called “The great silk mandala of entrapment” and you could stage it, floating in the mucus of your brain- an albino map among your memories. 

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Hey there, you have three new messages, and I’m here to tell you, this is no ordinary implant. Unlike other so called ‘cures’, this implant changed  my life. Don’t wait! This small device can let you see the world from inside the internet. Give up the endless checking, let go the clicking and typing of living on the outside. Imagine, finally, everything you thought lost from your childhood, every future goal, has come together. You can become anything and everything you want! At last, you, yes you, can be one with the web- I was a fifteen year old kid in Nebraska, and look at me now! I’m one of the ‘Top Ten Badass cats that  will Make your Monday feel like pizza day’. Incredible! Just follow the link for great success! This is your moment, never miss a click again! Congratulations!

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A seagull picks at a French fry. When he gets it in his mouth, the potato mushes and half breaks off, falling between the slats of the boardwalk. Cassie thinks she hears it hit the ocean beneath the planks, but it’s probably a crane creaking on the loading dock, or the washer of a flag hitting its post in the wind. The popsicle she’s slurping melts a stripe of purple down the side of her hand. When she licks up the drip the cardboard stick slips and the popsicle drops, splat, on her shoe. She kicks it off as if under attack. This causes the bottles in her raincoat pocket to clang together, so she shoves her hand between tem, sure they’ve spilled. Finding them safe, she keeps her hand around the vodka, wondering if Ed would mind if she started without him. His shift at the cafe ends soon, and because he is her first love, Cassie worries her tongue won’t taste like grape anymore. She’ll try not to swallow until she sees him walking.

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When he has the money, Tom is going to buy another coffee table. He’ll burn this one, preferably chopping it up first, but he doesn’t have an axe. The table is a thick plank of white pine, with a brick size stain in one corner. Tom hasn’t entertained wine or people since it emerged. “This room is too small anyway.” He thinks. He is kneeling between the bed and the table to rub grapefruit oil into the wood.

            Monty had knocked on his door earlier-“I called my mom, and she said grapefruit oil might work”- a pause- “She says she’s used it to mask a bleachy smell before- so I guess, um, I’ll just leave it at your door.” He was back two minutes later. “Look man, I’m really sorry, it was an accident, I wish you’d fucking relax.”

            The smells from the cleaners are all over Tom’s hands, and in the pores of his face. He feels dry and greasy at the same time, and wishes he could get drunk. Maybe he should try clear vodka or gin again, he’ll pinch his nose when he swallows. His phone rings, the screen reads ‘Mom’, and he wants to go home so badly that he doesn’t pick up. This month has felt like going nowhere, just back and forth, back and forth.

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There are things you buy and things you win. Buying something can be instantly forgettable, it becomes a thing you use. You didn’t work for your umbrella anymore. The effort of having a spare umbrella seems so far removed from the hours at your office, your spouse’s hours at the cafeteria. It’s just yours, and now you can keep spinning your wheels, coffee at work, tea at home, paperbacks in bed. in this loop, the morning light flicks on at the top and off at the bottom; the colours between them blur into a pastel haze. The things you win, you’ve won forever. You remember the dollars and arms you overextended to throw the ball, your heart filled with hope. You have a picture to prove that it was all for you. You won. You won, finally.

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I think about things in a circle. I start with my face; it feels as though I could push my cheeks into a new shape, model it after a smile in the newspaper. With a few good pinches, it creeps back to what it was, and then I think about the wood that makes the walls and wager how much more rot it will take before this room buries me in rubble, letting my body bubble beneath it until I’m just a steaming puddle. That makes me think of heat- so I turn on the lamp. In the light I like to wonder if the skin of a young woman’s back would lift with a blade, like a hunted deer’s. The flap could drape to one side, under her arm, giving her a kind of wing. A half an angel, bleeding out just for me.

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The lake is too cold for swimming, but it hasn't frozen over yet. I’m not sure if it will. The wind coming from the east hits the mountain and gets caught, making waves and snapping twigs before it hits me as a breeze. My hair shifts from my shoulders, taking its’ long warmth with it, and my hat holds on. I knit this hat myself, soft purple wool with stitched grey violets on the brim. I should have made the flowers white, like my hair, but the grey yarn lay on top of the pile, reaching to leave. It wasn’t in a ball, just loose and ready. You know, I’m glad I’m alone.

            I feel a drip at the tip of my nose. My nose is beak-lie, which I find harsh but Foster liked. He might still, I suppose. I purse my lips to catch the drip. I imagine I look like one of those insipid photos my niece puts on the internet- so I stretch my mouth tight into a sour smile, as thought the lonely lake will take the two expressions, and call it a draw.

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I can’t play a musical instrument. This often makes me feel caudled and childish, as though I am in a cushy room where my senses pace through things to adore: flaxen fabrics to be wrapped in but never grasp. I touch things and hear a deep thud in their release. I watch the dust bring the smell of wood from the hollow beneath the strings. In the most casual melodies, some part of me is reeling, letting notes weave over each other, a diamond in my forehead, a perfect patch of sound. M sticky fingers find a fray, snag a thread, and I pull, leaving the reeds, and me, to unravel from the edge.

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Brian’s eyes have a bit of a twitch. It often happens when Rebecca tries to flick his hair out of his face. She says the hair flies like that because it’s too dry in his apartment. He doesn’t notice the itch until she’s touching him, but he lies and thanks her for the relief. Every once in a while, he’ll pitch the idea of her leaving, but she smiles, like it’s a trick, and picks new paint for his bedroom.

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Foster stands on a wet boulder at the water’s edge. He’s scrambled off of the boardwalk, but no one has seen him, and he doubts they would care. It’s only eight o’clock at night. These past few weeks the sun leaves early, and people hide in their screens, where darkness is bluer, smokey, and high heeled. A true darkness spreads over the ocean, and Foster pulls his coat across his chest, feeling in his pocket for the stone. Retrieved, the clear square of quartz sits flat in his palm; he lets his hand freeze as he raises it to his heart. His fingers close around the four, sharp points, and the prayer he sends is for Anna, in hopes to send her sweetness, in the memories that are rich and perfumed. In his whispers, he wishes for the bitterness between them to travel. He places the quartz back in his pocket, and the cold and the salt feel like a cutting clarity, but he isn't ready to go home.

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It’s funny how versions of the past are structured by their surroundings. People dressed as Elizabethans in nineteen fifty five look as much like nineteen fifty five as they do the sixteen hundreds. ‘Elizabethans’ today will be different than they were in the nineteen eighties. Nostalgia is always shifting its focus; what we, people, desire from the past becomes new every time we emulate it. We let our egos plan for a beautiful future, but we stand looking down an expanding tunnel of time, so tomorrow is behind us.

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I like your efforts here. Would love to receive a postcard with one of your stories in the PoP PO Box. I'll be happy to post it on the PoP blog.

Thanks so kindly! I write each card fairly carefully, so I am not the most frequent poster. I will send you a card soon, thanks for the support!

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Our rowboat is spinning in circles because we have the giggles. My brother Matty has one oar, I the other, but we are just dipping them in and out of the water. The boat our mother took is moving away from us, propelled solely by her because her passenger, Jim, is reciting an unrequested radio play. His voice carries across the water, but as they pull away he is reduced to an erratic accent. Jim is our neighbour, one year younger than me but still older than Matty. Matty and I fought for the whole drive to the lake. Mom hardly said anything to Jim, who rode shotgun. ‘Take life jackets’ she said before we pushed the boat from the dock. We are sitting on them now. Jim wore one but she hadn’t asked him to. As the boats separate further, everything ripples into the perfect joke. The perfect future recollection.

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Haunted House

My eyes close tight but the red light pulses hot through my lids. I trip over lying limbs, slip off ledges. There is a sheet metal wail on loop, singing to the howls of wind and wolves. My hands are shoved into spaghetti brains and green grape eyeballs. I let them become real organs in my mind and senses. I let the wet suction sound nauseate me, and the starchy film on my hands itches like it’s alive. Being afraid does not make me feel like a little kid, it makes me feel old. I feel so old that I am lost to the world, like I am sixty five million years old, and if I fall I will never get up again.