Back of a Postcard

I was orphaned in a war-torn country. They herded me out onto the road in the middle of the night with the rest of the kids. The floodlights shined across the asphalt, and snow and ash fell in the light. There was yelling and confusion. Some of the kids were crying. They urged us towards the trucks, where soldiers in long coats with rifles slung over their shoulders were grabbing the kids one by one by their arms and hoisting them aboard. And when they had us loaded, they slammed and latched the tailgate and piled off down the road. I never knew what became of my parents or my home; I had no memory of any of it.

They moved us around to different facilities, like they weren’t sure what to do with us. The first night they bunked me in a room with two other boys. It was a bare yellow room with a bare yellow tile floor. The door to the room was a heavy door with heavy frosted glass and it buzzed to open and it locked back with a loud snap behind me. The other two boys had already claimed the lower two beds in the room, and the only bed left was mounted on a beam, high up towards the ceiling. I had to climb across one of the other beds to get up to it, and the boy in the bed grumbled and griped at me as I stumbled across his feet. When I got up there, I found that the bed was essentially just a narrow wooden board with a thin cushion on it for padding. I could barely fit on the board, and I could see that it was a long drop to the floor. I spent most of the night clinging to board, afraid that I would fall to my death if I dozed off, until I finally succumbed to sleep, despite my efforts to stay awake.

Then I woke up somewhere else. Always somewhere else. As though they had moved us again in the middle of the night. There were always different kids there. I never had a chance to get to know any of them, or even really remember their names or their faces. There was a number that was printed on a little white strip of cloth that was stitched to the arm of the grey coat that they had given me. The same number was stamped in smudged ink on the blanket and the pillow that they had given me, the only possessions that followed with me from place to place. I was known by this number. If I had had a name, I couldn’t remember it.

Sometimes a postcard would come for one of the kids that I was sharing a room with. The postcards always had pretty pictures on the front and writing on the back. I never saw one of the cards up close, only from across the room. There were always pictures of mountains and castles and bright blue skies, colorful beautiful magical places beyond these drab yellow walls. And they always looked like they were overflowing with words, cramped urgent words fighting to fit on the small space afforded on the back of the card.

Whenever a kid got a postcard, their face would light up and they would laugh and jump in their beds and then tuck the card away under their pillow. The postcards meant that their parents or someone in their family had tracked them down and located them. The postcards meant reconnection. They meant home. And the kid would go to sleep smiling, clutching their pillow, probably feeling the edge of the cardboard against the tip of their finger. And sure enough, a few days or a week or so later, the door would buzz and the staff would bring the parents into the room, and they would all smile and cry and reach out for each other. I saw it happen so many times, from my place in the far corner of the room. I thought about stealing one of the postcards. Maybe someone would come for me. But I knew the postcards didn’t work that way.

All these moves and changes finally led me to a backyard behind a bungalow house, like a little backyard in the suburbs. They had a group of the orphaned kids there, playing in a sandbox and splashing around with a garden hose. I sat on a bench nearby. I was getting too old to play like that. I just sat and watched the other kids play. There was a soldier sitting on the bench next to me with his arm across the back of the bench, and he still had a rifle slung over his shoulder, just like the soldiers had had that night that they had loaded us into the trucks. I looked over at him and past him, and I squinted at the bright blue sky.

A woman in a flowery summer dress came across the yard to me. She had a warm smile on her face, and I thought that maybe this was the woman that brings the postcards. She tapped me lightly on the arm, and she said that she had something she wanted to show me. She led me over to a metal gate that was at the head of the driveway along the side of the house. She opened the gate and swung it wide and she took me by the shoulder and bent down close to me, her dark hair falling around my face, and she told me that this was a special day and that it was okay for me to go now. Then she ushered me out through gate and closed it behind me, and then she was gone.

I took a deep breath, and I walked down the driveway, and I looked back, and it felt like all of it, all of it, had just happened there in that sunny little backyard. And it was okay, just as the woman had promised. I continued down the driveway and I turned onto the sidewalk and headed down the street. And there were the most amazing houses on this street. There were grand old houses that were six or seven stories tall with turrets and gables of all sorts of colors piled atop one another, and behind the houses there was a mist that was starting to clear, and through the mist I could see a stone castle looming unbelievably huge above the houses. As I turned around the bend, I saw that there was more mist and fog on my left, and I could make out vague shapes of something, and I knew that when the mist finally cleared, something even more inconceivable than the castle would appear. I laughed and quickened my pace, knowing that I was bringing it closer with every step.