It Depends on How You Look at It

Desolate Postcard

DESOLATE POSTCARD

"I don't know why people think desolation is so beautiful." he thought bitterly, "Desolation is desolate."

He knew the handwriting on the postcard he'd picked up from beneath the letter slot just a moment before. Apparently he'd overlooked it when he'd picked up the mail off the floor earlier that morning. What the mailman brought hardly ever contained anything interesting these days - junk mail and advertisements. Mostly he didn't look through it carefully. If the postcard had been with the rest of the mail, he might have overlooked it completely, tossing it out with the rest, without ever knowing it had been there.

"Just look at it!" he said aloud, turning it over in his hand. A dark horizon, a single leafless tree and some pearly smudges in a slate grey sky. The bottom half was completely black.

"Half of it is desolate and half is the black void itself. What's this supposed to be anyway" he wondered, "an invitation to suicide?"

"Well," he thought smugly, "you can't make me jealous with this! I'm for sure not going there..."

He threw down the card. It skitted across the mahogany tabletop, teetered on the edge and fluttered to the floor, picture side up.

"I think that I shall never see, a postcard desolate as thee." He hummed the tune out loud and snickered at his own vicious cleverness.

She'd only left him a few weeks ago and already she was taunting him with postcards from far away places. Well, why not? They'd parted friends - sort of. It's what they'd agreed on. At least that was what they'd bravely said to each other at the time.

But now, now that she was really, all the way gone, now, he found that he wasn't feeling very friendly. Not a bit friendly, if the truth be known. In fact, he thought with loathing of her dull blue eyes that had so often filled with distain when he tried to talk to her about formula one racing cars. How she'd mocked him when he confided in her his secret love of watches with a sweep second hand. She called him shallow - a mechanical man - with a wind up spring where his soul should have been.

He hated her spirited nature, the way she jumped from one thing to another. Why did she always want to try new things? She constantly confounded his careful plans and upset his comfortable routine. He reached down and picked up the postcard again, turning it over and over in his hands. He looked at the familiar handwriting, the signature with the little x's underneath. Then, finding the exact middle, he tore it into a hundred small, nearly identical squares.