Free Postcards from a Dead Girl by Kirk Farber Page A

middle of the night can draw attention. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, but now that I’m awake, I feel hoarse, like I might have been yelling for the past ten minutes. I roll gingerly off the bed and tiptoe to the balcony. I peek over the edge. Nobody’s looking up at me. I listen to the soundtrack of the room. It’s quiet. No fists pounding my door. No cautionary phone calls. But then again, I’m in a foreign land. Maybe it’s customary to let out an occasional nightmare-induced shriek, or, more realistically, to avoid the source of such a sound. Maybe I wasn’t screaming at all. I could have been whimpering like a little girl, for all I know.
    I venture a full look over the balcony, gaze down at the streets of Barcelona. An eerie, predawn quiet blankets the city. Only a scattering of cars peruse the normally chaotic roads. A few people stumble home from bars. A lone dog roams the sidewalk, sniffs, and pees randomly, as if marking the entire city as his own. I feel a strange urge to go downstairs and follow him. I wonder where he’s been, and where he’s going, or if he’s just wandering aimlessly.
    Suddenly I can’t wait to get home. I realize I want to stop wandering myself. Knowing that the Barcelona postcard could have come from the gift shop feels like enough. I don’t think I can face another European postmaster, or another day in the blinding sun.
    The next day’s travel home is a long, exhausted blur of checkouts and check-ins, tickets and airports, fruit juice and tiny foil snack packages. There is pressurized cabin air, a safety presentation, and hourly updates on the weather. In-flight magazines try to sell me on more vacations, and offer incredible inventions to put me at ease: cylindrical neck rests, earphone noise-reducers, easy-wrap garden hose storage units, suction-cup shower mirrors, ice-cube trays that make duck-shaped ice. It’s all an effective distraction from the traveling that’s actually happening.
    By the time I drag my suitcase across the long-term parking lot and sit in my car, I am weary and ready to be done. I feel discombobulated, as if I’ve never even been in a car before, and now I’m sitting at the wheel, the inexperienced pilot of an amazing technological invention that will careen me down the highway at high speed.
    I feel drunk.
    Surprisingly, I quickly adapt to driving. The familiarity of the highways and exit signs puts me in a better state. Traffic seems to be flowing well, until I see a car pulled over on the right side of the highway with its hazards on. Everyone ahead of me taps their brakes to slow down and gawk instead of simply moving over to the left, as if they’ve never seen a car pulled over before.
    â€œDon’t stop on the highway,” I say to the traffic, “just keep rolling.”
    Eventually the congestion clears, and I find my way onto more comfortable back roads away from all the noise. I think about my recent journeys and consider what I’ve found. London, Paris, andBarcelona. Different people, language barriers, and blazing sun. Lots of strangers and unanswered questions. What kind of trip is that? What could Zoe have done there that would be so worth sending postcards about?
    I open the window for some fresh air. The stars are out tonight, trying their best to shine through the haze of the spring humidity. Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper hang upside down in the sky. On the roadside ahead I spot a black-and-white animal. From my perspective, it looks like a miniature cow, but as I get closer, I see it’s a cat with Holstein markings. The cow-cat sits on the edge of the road, ready to cross once I’ve passed. And I wonder, how can animals survive so close to speeding cars? I think of Zoe and her fierce compassion for animals, especially the feral and abandoned ones. She would probably make me pull over and feed it or take it to a shelter. But I keep on