Ten-Word Tragedies

by Tim Lebbon

  I crouched at the hearth and placed the postcard on the fire. This was the fireplace we used to sit round, the three of us, to watch TV as a family. It was the fireplace where I used to burn the list of presents Matty wrote to Santa Claus, the flames reflected in the convex mirrors of his bright, expectant eyes. I said to myself, if it was good enough for Santa’s list, it was good enough for this.

  The postcard turned to ash, curling black, then levitating up the chimney, sucked by the draw.

  Jen arrived home white and shivering from the cold, complaining under her breath about the lack of cooperation of the U.S. Postal Service, mumbling that she would take it to someone in authority, someone higher up. But her words soon ran aground and she dried up, lost and helpless, slumping onto the couch. I made her soup but she started shouting and took herself to bed.

  No postcards were delivered the next day. I closed the empty mail box.

  ‘What does it mean?’ Her arms were wrapped around her body. She was bent over in the armchair, rocking.

  I don’t know, I said. Lying, or trying to soften the blow at least: Maybe it means Matty is happy and can move on to the next life.

  She said, ‘What about me? What do I do?’

  You’ve got life, I said. You’ve got it right here.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  I tried to give her answers, but the guilt was crushing me inside, like barbed wire twisting and tightening, and I couldn’t say anything much. I felt sick, but I had to go on feeling sick. It was the only way forward.

  The days passed, and no more postcards came.

  I watched her check the mailbox every day, every hour. She could hardly tear her eyes away from it, even to eat or drink. She’d take her mug with her—only hot water from the kettle now, never coffee or tea—stand there for hours, with the neighbors passing, dog-walking, trying to start a conversation, failing. One time I heard her say she was waiting to hear from Matty. That Matty was going to tell her some important news real soon.

  Then, one day, she didn’t go outside. Said it was cold and she didn’t want to. I’d not been taking on much work by then. I had to stay in all day looking after her. We’d got money put away. We were fine in that regard, but I couldn’t leave her.

  ‘I think he’s stopped loving us,’ she said. ‘He’s stopped remembering us.’ That was the only thing it could be, she said.

  I asked if she wanted me to go to the mailbox.

  She thought for a while then nodded her head, weakly.

  I came back in and shook my head.

  She looked completely blank. Not sad, not happy—nothing.

  ‘Donkey. Pretty donkey.’ She touched one of the old postcards with the tips of her fingers. The nail polish was cracked and bitty, and her nails were half-chewed. She hadn’t washed or cut her hair for months, because she had the idea that if she did, Matty wouldn’t know who she was anymore. The tragedy was, I didn’t know who she was anymore.

  When her sentences didn’t make sense and her eye contact was like the stare from inside some inert husk, the diagnosis of a mental breakdown was inevitable. It was obvious that she needed a place to recover and get the proper care. And she did. A wonderful place near Hyannis not a lot different from the rich people’s estates on Martha’s Vineyard, but this was for people who had nothing, as opposed to everything. The unstable, not the terminally safe and sound. And in all her irrationality, would you believe, the one thing she was fully aware of was she didn’t want to go to that place, she wanted to go home. And they were nice people, and they took her, and they said that wasn’t unusual, and she’d be all right, I would see, with the medication and the therapy and the attention and the rest, I would see.

  But all I could see was that I was alone.

  And I stared into that fire and nothing in the world could get me warm again. Not even the bottles of Jack Daniel’s I consumed. Not even the flames as they ate up the cards that had come after his death, one by one.

  Desert Donkeys Burros…Desert Scene, Arizona…Greetings from Arizona, The Grand Canyon State…

  Did he forgive me?

  Did I?

  Sometimes I got to thinking her madness was the easy way. The way that made sense. I’d visit and we’d sit facing the trees and she wouldn’t say a word, and I’d tell her what I’d done that week, doing some coppicing, or up high on the canopy, overlooking the clap-board houses with their widow’s-walks, or Buzzard’s Bay. I’d be praying for the hour to be over. Then praying to be back there beside her. Praying for a sentence, a word, an improvement, a smile, a look that brought it all back, intact and wonderful, like it used to be.

  She attempted suicide. Twice. Kept talking about it to her psychiatrist. Said Matty wanted her to be with him. Said it was the only place she could be alive: the desert, with the dust, and the sun, and the cloud over that distant, nameless city, with the arrows of electricity falling.

  She spoke to him, that doctor, but she didn’t speak to me.

  Eventually I received a postcard.

  Block capitals. Simplistic, sentimental—as if somebody had dictated it word by word to a young child. But I knew it wasn’t a child. It was her.

  They gradually became more frequent. The writing clearer, more flowing, more open. She was getting better. I could tell. And, in time, they told me she was well enough to come home. Part of me was euphoric. Another part of me, unbelievably anxious, to the point of panic.

  The threat of her suicide attempts had hung over me for so long I’d forgotten what it was like to be without them. For over a year I’d lived in terror of getting a phone call in the middle of the night, telling me the inevitable had happened, that she had been successful this time. Every day that I woke to sunlight shining through the blinds, knowing she was still alive, was a day of reprieve.

  Now, in a few hours’ time, I will be collecting her, and our lives will be able to resume, but even last night I lay awake, convinced that the worst might happen. The phone on my nightstand might bleat its sickening distress call. Its melodious death knell.

  I eat my cereal standing up, looking out at the yellow and orange tapestry of leaves that need raking up. I dress and pocket my cell phone, still not free of the feeling it might ring at any moment. I play out our coming meeting in my mind. Her old voice greeting me, talking like she used to talk, being the person she used to be. Then a part of me imagines walking in to be confronted by the news she has killed herself. I have literally no idea which eventuality it is more likely to be, which to expect.

  Buttoning my parka and flicking up the fur-lined hood, I leave the house, passing the mail box just as Virgil, the postman, walks away from it, hailing me with a slight wave before trudging on his way.

  I turn back and look inside. I see a postcard. Nothing else.

  On the front is a photograph of the Nobska Lighthouse, a picture I’ve seen a thousand times but it’s like I’m seeing it afresh. On the back I read:

  Dear Mason

  I’m looking forward to being with you. I know I haven’t been for a while. Thanks for being there, even when I wasn’t. Thanks for believing. I know I’m going to see you soon, but maybe I’ll beat this card home!

  Jen xx

  I climb into the pickup and start the engine. The interior is freezing, but pretty soon the blast of heat warms my cheeks and hands. The windshield clears, as if the great breath that had misted it moves away.

  The postcard in my inside pocket, over my heart, I drive.

  SHE FORGOT THEM ALL, SHE COULD NOT REMEMBER ANYTHING BUT LONGING

  KELLY BRAFFET

  AT THE JUNK SHOP, MIG SPENT TEN CENTS for four postcards. The one from Alaska she put away, in case she ever needed it; the one from Atlantic City, she sent to Father Brian. Here for a weekend with the girls from work! Thinking of you often and hope you are well. She was not in Atlantic City and there were no girls from work. There was no work. She had not written to Father Brian in a while. She was in Clifton because Karen was in Clifton, and if not for Fat
her Brian she never would have met Karen, so in that sense, a kind of gratitude: yes, she did hope Father Brian was well.

  The other two postcards were from Cancun, Mexico. One had been written out but never addressed or sent. Mig wondered why, without a great deal of interest: had the writer forgotten, or thought better of it? Hello from sunny Cancun, the postcard said. Here are some boring facts. The boring facts were a gift; the postcards were a gift. On the way back to her little space, the private nook that was all very hers, Mig lit a cigarette, and blew smoke at Cancun, written and blank. Whatever had stopped the writer from sending the card, may it blow away with the smoke. She was going to walk through the park but there were mothers with children there, near the swing set. So she kept walking; doubled back, and crossed through by the tennis courts, where they couldn’t see her.

  Back safe in her secret little space, she lay the two cards next to each other on the table and imagined things she might have purchased while shopping in Cancun: a hat, a bracelet, sunglasses. The quaintest little pig. Karen liked pigs. Perhaps the junk store had one.

  Dear Karen, she wrote.

  The weather now was muggy, oppressive, but when Father Brian told her about the retreat an early spring rain had tapped gently at the window of his office. Pope Paul had stared beatifically down at her from the portrait over his shoulder and the light through the water drops on the window had made His Holiness look like he had a skin disease.

  Just for young women like you, Father Brian said, his good deed beaming out of his smooth round face. A week long, in a convent upstate. The grounds are lovely. There’s a lake.

  There was also a brochure and Mig had taken it reverently, her eyes slightly awestruck as she stared up at him. Father Brian who hung the moon, Father Brian who was Christ’s emissary on earth. Father Brian who practically swelled with pride (ha) when Mig so much as looked at him.

  Truly? she said. For me?

  For you. The ladies took up a collection, he said.

  The ladies, the ladies. The ladies from the congregation, the ladies whose pies and cakes and quick breads and casseroles had lured Mig to Sacred Blood in the first place; the ladies who had mostly been so generous that winter, bringing her their daughters’ old dresses and knitting her hats when it began to snow and gifting her with pale, girlish cosmetics. The ladies who were kind words in the pews and flinty eyes at coffee hour, whenever poor friendless Mig from the foster home dared speak with their precious husbands and sons. Who Mig did not want anyway, who were of no use whatsoever to Mig. Yes. The ladies would have taken up a collection, indeed, to send Mig away.

  That’s so kind of them, she said to Father Brian. They’re so kind to me.

  It’s about time somebody was, Father Brian said, and Mig had touched his hand, shyly.

  You are, she said. You always are.

  Hiya Karen–

  Her special little space was ingenious. The table folded down and there was a cushion to put on top, to make a bed; there was a toaster oven and a sink and a cunning little refrigerator, although the trailer’s electricity was off so none of them worked. Behind a plastic folding door was a shower stall, just big enough for a person to stand in. Mig had stood there herself, although the shower didn’t work either, and she had barely to lean in any direction to touch the pebbled fiberglass wall. She didn’t close the door because there was no light and she didn’t want to stand in the dark. She had never liked small spaces before but the small spaces she’d known were locked closets, underbed hiding places, the Prayer Box. That had been a funny one, the Prayer Box. It was a cardboard refrigerator box with crosses painted inside. It was supposed to focus the occupant and inside it, Mig was supposed to pray aloud for forgiveness and healing. When the social worker came for the monthly check-in she said What a sweet little playhouse, and Mig and the foster couple and the other kids had all smiled smiled smiled, and once the social worker was gone in the kids went, one after another. Because God knew best and he never gave you more than you needed and there were lessons to be learned from everything, the man half of the couple said. Mig was already pretty cynical by then and she had already learned the most important lesson, which was that it was bad to be female and unloved and too small to fight back, but other than the Prayer Box that home had not been too terrible. That couple had fed her well, which the most recent couple had not, which was why she’d ended up standing on the corner across from Sacred Blood watching the ladies take food in for the after-Mass coffee hour and thinking, Now what do I have to do to get some of that cake.

  Anyway.

  The small space of the travel trailer was different. In that space, a person could live rather nicely. Mig had never owned more than could fit in a garbage bag, anyway. Karen, on the other hand, lived in a sweet little house with cleanish siding and had her own room and a gingham bedspread—Mig had peeked—and lots of books and hair things for her pretty hair. There were no pictures of musicians on the walls like every other young person Mig had known—no Kinks or Stones or Beatles—and Mig knew that was because Karen’s parents wouldn’t allow them. And clothes, in all the colors of the rainbow. Karen would have to give up some of her possessions, when she and Mig were together, but perhaps there were bigger trailers, where Karen could have some hair things and some colorful clothes, and they could go from town library to town library and Mig would bring Karen tall stacks of books and watch as she read them. Or maybe Karen would feel, as Mig did, that none of those things were important, if only they were together.

  Hiya Karen—your roommate, Mig, sending you a friendly ‘hello’ from Cancun.

  By the time the she’d gotten off the bus at the retreat she had already written a letter for Father Brian in her head but she would wait a few days to put it on paper and send it. She had spent the rest of the trip envisioning the various kinds of friends she and Father Brian might end up being, depending on where he bent when she pressed him (her favorite scenario ended with a sweet little apartment and secret but infrequent visits and lots of time to herself), and also how the couple from her current placement had laughed when she’d told them about the retreat, and thinking of those two things together had reminded her of that one boy from three homes ago who’d eyed her up and down her first night, and said, You’re cute. Want to fuck?

  Mig had looked him up and down in return. What do I get out of it? she’d said.

  He hadn’t liked that and that particular home hadn’t lasted too long. She hadn’t fit in, the social worker said. The stupid boy hadn’t even understood that if he’d just answered her question they could have gotten along just fine.

  Anyway.

  She’d left the bus feeling sassy and thorny and that wasn’t at all the way to be, for this retreat she needed to be a sweet Catholic girl, looking to—what was the thing Father Brian had said?—grow her faith. Yes, that was it. The very conservative Sacred Blood ladies had even sprung for a pair of tidy little white gloves for Mig to wear, even though nobody else in the world had worn little white gloves for ten years (not even the ladies’ daughters, some of whom were even bold enough to wear slacks to Mass). She felt like a paper doll but the nuns in their habits smiled when they saw her. And the grounds really were beautiful, like in the brochure; Mig had never seen swathes of green that wide, or real swans, or actual apple trees with fragrant white blossoms with a fragrance that almost made her believe in heaven. The convent halls were wide and spacious (even Sacred Blood was dingy and cramped, when you left the nave), built of warm wood and flooded with light. Mig had liked it. Perhaps she would join a convent, she thought, as the sister led her to her room, which was plain but more comfortable than any Mig had ever slept in; but an hour spent in that room—in quiet contemplation—convinced Mig that convent life was not for her.

  Then Karen walked in: an angel from one of the paintings in Father Brian’s office, all smooth skin, soft hair, and big, sad eyes. Although Karen had nothing to be sad about, she was the only child of a family that loved her thoroughly if (Mig
came to think) a bit oppressively, and had come on the retreat—she explained—to, quite genuinely, grow her faith. She wanted to go to Rome, she told Mig, that first night, after dinner. She wanted to see the Vatican. She wanted to see Lourdes. She wanted to see Israel.

  I am going to Israel, Mig said, before she really even knew the words were going to come out of her mouth. And that was unlike her, because Mig planned everything, but already she wanted to wrap Karen in a warm soft blanket of protection and touch that soft soft hair and then Karen’s precious rosebud of a mouth fell open in awe and Mig decided that perhaps her own mouth had just been a few steps ahead of her brain, that her mouth knew what her brain didn’t yet.

  Yes, Israel, Mig said, wondering what else her mouth knew. This summer.

  Hiya Karen, your roommate Mig sending you a friendly ‘hello’ from Cancun. I switched from Israel to Mexico due to the trouble happening in Israel (my family was nervous about my going there).

  Perhaps you could bring your family next week, Father Brian had said, after three weeks of Mig coming to Mass and coffee hour, three weeks of him wrapping his hands around Mig’s at the church door afterward, three weeks of Mig probing him gently, looking for a weak spot in this nice young priest with the nice young life, some Mig-shaped hole (ha) that she could fill.

  I don’t have a family. I live in a foster home, she’d said, letting her eyes slide abashedly away to one corner. And this was a truth. Mig’s mother was gone, disappeared into the penal system. Mig might have had a father but who knew. Mig had vaguely fond memories of a grandmother, but old people died.