Mark Schimmoeller
Postcards
The writing professor wanted us to finish our winter-term course assignments, remarkable given that we’d recently discovered humanity had only one year of existence left. She did tweak the last story assignment, asking us to write about someone we knew who had a project that should have been started earlier. I’m decades older than the other students, and her words made my skin itch. I feared that one of my classmates would want to interview me.
The students, however, ignored the request, leaving the university to take care of more urgent matters. I drew a blank on what to do in the coming weeks and months, so I remained in the class. Just me and the professor, every Tuesday and Thursday, while the world went berserk around us.
She didn’t act like I was the only student in the class; I didn’t act like she was the only professor on campus.
I’m not sure why I didn’t have anything more pressing. I’m a bit embarrassed by that.
The assignment gave me an excuse to visit a friend. Jeremy Orr would be doing something, everything else be damned, what little I knew about him. I hadn’t seen him since middle school, but I heard he was a hermit, living off tree nuts and fruits. We had corresponded sporadically in the last few years. His postcards were made of pressed shagbark from a hickory tree, and I brought them into my suburban home and displayed them on the mantle above the fireplace. I have six of them. Of all my things—the lamps with their embroidered shades, the white oak floors, the glass and walnut dining room table—they are what attract the eye. My wife, who died of Covid five years ago, didn’t like them. Or didn’t like the way I stared at them. “They make you sad,” she said.
I disagree. I look at them as one would look at a souvenir. People often have souvenirs from places they haven’t been, sent to them by friends or family who have, and one can feel a pleasure like the travelers must have experienced.
In his last postcard—sent a year ago on January 19, 2025—Jeremy wrote directions to his place. Though I knew Harmony Road—it dead ended in the northern part of my county—the directions made no sense. They would have me cross the Elk River on foot. He said his earthen roof baffled GPS. I was not to use GPS. I needed to be baffled instead, apparently, by handwritten instructions.
The muscles in my neck and shoulders unexpectedly relaxed as my Tesla backed out of the garage on the morning I set out to find him. By the time I left Woodland Estates, I was listening to the Rocky soundtrack, music that hadn’t appealed to me since my first days in college. These songs had turned sour on me. But when? A decade into my corporate career? Two or three?
Wednesday morning and already a line coming out of First Federal, people standing deep into the parking lot, hunched against a chill in the air.
I made it out of town.
On one of my visits to Jeremy’s childhood house—we were in sixth grade—we decided to cross a barbed wire fence into someone else’s land. Jeremy lived then with his parents in a saltbox tenant farmhouse on a cow and tobacco farm, and we had always stayed within the boundaries. When Jeremy squeezed through the barbed wire that day, I followed, feeling free and reckless.
On the other side of the fence, we moved quietly forward, avoiding branches on the ground. He was more like me then—a shy, rule-abiding, good student. I never followed him after that day. I don’t know why. He kept going where he wasn’t supposed to go.
He whispered that we should try to step on rocks if we could, so they couldn’t find us. I’m not sure now who they was, but I think I knew then. If we stepped on the ground, we would have to brush leaves and sticks over our prints. We used cedar branches like brooms. For some of the way, we stepped from rock to rock along the creek bed.
After what seemed like a long trespass, we entered a cedar grove and stopped. I don’t think either of us had ever been so secreted from the world. How the topic came up, I’m not sure, all I remember is that in this cedar grove we talked about the Capron twins, Jasmine and Jessica, who were in our class. We felt safe talking about them here, nearly certain they couldn’t hear us.
Jeremy and I hadn’t mentioned them before, though I believe we knew of each other’s interest in them. They had freckles and long, auburn hair and maintained just enough distance from the popular girls for us to dream about them. Jessica was more of a tomboy, Jasmine more feminine. The revelation in the cedar grove was that we were attracted to the other girl, Jeremy to Jessica and I to Jasmine, a revelation that turned our friendship into a near blood bond. We loved each other for loving the other girl.
On the way back, we swung on a wild grapevine, a more dangerous activity than typical for us, imagining that the Capron girls were there to see us. We joked about how Jasmine would never swing on a grapevine.
~
I parked where Harmony Road ended, activated the Tesla’s global alarm, and set out on what looked like a deer trail. Jeremy wrote that I would be able to find my way once on the trail, yet after a while the trail forked. The clearest path headed away from the river through a sunlit field of yellow and brown grasses. The other way headed down an embankment toward the Elk River, cedar trees blocking the sun and casting a shade that seemed familiar. It had blue in it amidst the black.
~
A homeless encampment had sprung up on campus, and my schedule quickly became known. Getting to the Sylvia A. Bee Humanities Building required me having up to ten five-dollar bills. A member of the National Guard now let me in the building, after I presented my student identification.
The professor was always in the room, even if I was early, and always prepared, though once I saw her hastily put her long hair back in a bun. I guessed she was maybe ten years younger than I was. I admit that I often thought of Jasmine as I watched her lecture, the auburn hair a similarity.
One Tuesday she said it was time for our last story workshop. Because of the small class size, we would start with a story that a student had—hypothetically—submitted.
In this story, a young woman wanted to go out into the world and have adventures and write a novel, but she kept hearing her father’s voice in her head, urging her to be responsible, establish a career. The voice gave her headaches. In the end, she decided she would have no peace until she followed his wishes. She went to graduate school, received her doctorate, and by the time she was twenty-eight she was a tenured professor at a university. Then she began to hear another voice in her head, this one telling her to live her life. But by this time, she was a divorced mother of two, and she had no option but to continue bringing home a paycheck.
In a voice still calibrated for a room full of students, the professor went on to discuss the workshop etiquette, how we were to talk first about what we liked about the story. When we talked about what we would change, we would refer to the story as our own. We were not to bring attention to the author of the story.
“James, would you like to start,” she asked.
I’d signed up for my first creative writing class on a complete whim—the same day I took an early retirement—and I’d been one of the quieter students. Not discontented. Just like in a daze. I listened to the discussions of the emotional states of fictional characters as I would, it seemed to me, stare at Jeremy’s postcards once I got home. Not a blank kind of daze. More like a soaking-in kind of daze. It blew my mind that someone could arrange words on paper and make someone else feel a character’s emotions.
I’d never been called on before. I suppose I should have anticipated the possibility, given the sparsely attended classroom.
“I like the story,” I said.
“What makes you like it?” the professor asked.
I saw that her eyes were red, like she hadn’t slept.
“I mean, I don’t like it for the character,” I said. “I wish she could have been in a different story.”
“What kind of story would you like her to be in?”
For the first time, the professor moved from the back of her desk to the front of it. She leaned against it, her hands gripping its sides.
“She has tenure,” the professor continued. “She has two children, whom, presumably, she loves. Why would she want anything different?”
“To get away from the voices in her head,” I said.
“Ah, the bothersome voices,” she said. “The infernal voices. Is this a complete story, James?”
“It’s more like a summary.”
“Right. A statement about a life. Period at the end. That’s all she wrote. So, tell me how you would turn this from a statement of fact into a story?”
I couldn’t think of what to say, and in the silence, heat rushed to my face.
“Well,” the professor said, “I would describe the voices more. Maybe they crawl out of her eyes. Wouldn’t that be a different thing for voices to do? They’d crawl out of her eyes loud and irritating and gang up on the first thing they come to. Say a coffee mug. Say they get all over an innocent coffee mug, berating it for being in the service of grading papers instead of writing a novel. Then they go from the coffee cup to her children.”
Her fingers had turned white.
When she spoke next, she whispered, and I felt, for the first time, alone with her in the university.
“My story, you see, needs details if I want it to be alive. That’s a big if. And fewer periods. It has too many sentences. It has too many endings.”
~
I set off on the well-trod, sunlit path, but something stopped me. I turned around. On the faint path going the other way lay a cedar branch. It looked recently snapped from a tree.
I reversed direction, picked up the cedar branch and headed into the blue shade toward the river.
The path dropped, and I was inside a cleft in the hillside, stepping on rocks and roots. I’m not sure one could describe it as a path at this point. I had to lower my body to scoot down miniature cliffs. Shagbark hickories grew among the cedars on either side of me. When I rested, I stared at bark that curled like off ramps from trunks.
He sands the inner side of the bark, turning it to a light tan. Pencil marks show up clearly on this side. I like the contrast between the tan side and rough gray side. That’s why I always have a couple of the postcards on the mantle turned the other way. Each card has two Forever Amphibian stamps on it. That’s more than what is needed. But who would know for shagbark postcards. The stamps look old.
I’m not sure what I expected once I was on the riverbank. Though the Elk River is small, more like a large creek, one still couldn’t cross it without getting submerged.
~
The professor is always asking me where the emotional center of a scene is. She directs me to pick an object or an action or a setting that can carry that emotion. She says this like I can accomplish the task. We both sit in desks now. She makes the desks look more comfortable than they are. Maybe if I were as slender as she is, they would feel comfortable to me too.
We’re spending far more time on my story than the hypothetical student’s. I’d likely feel insecure if we focused on an absent person’s work. As it is, I’m gradually gaining confidence in her presence. I even told her about staring at Jeremy’s postcards. That’s about all I do now since I’ve stopped watching television.
She didn’t seem surprised.
Sometimes I look at the postcards like they are hands. The sanded sides feel like skin.
~
It took me a minute to see the rusted church bell hanging from driftwood. The driftwood was set vertically in a pile of rocks. A length of twine hung from the bell’s clapper.
I wasn’t surprised that he would have a nonstandard doorbell. I dropped my cedar branch and rang the bell three times; a minute later, Jeremy came bounding through the underbrush on the other side of the water. He wore buckskin and a fur cap, and he stopped when he saw me.
“James Dunworth!” he yelled to me.
~
“Take me there,” the professor said.
“What?” I said.
She got up and locked the door. I saw then, through the small door window, a couple of men in garbage bag ponchos drift by. It had started to rain and sleet. Maybe the National Guard was letting people shelter in the building.
“Transport me,” the professor said.
~
I’m a good traveler as I sit in my recliner. It’s an off-white leather with walnut trim. We chose it because it matched the dining room table. I should exercise, but my mind wanders more when I’m in my recliner. If they ever discover—within the next few months, I mean—that a wandering mind helps with the heart, I’d be pleased.
Each of Jeremy’s postcards is written with precise detail, the last one precise in the most practical way, the earlier ones more like poems, precise that way—the bluebirds coming out of the cedar tree, a moon shadow of smoke rising from the chimney, etc. I want to impress the professor with my last story, as I’m sure Jeremy could—yet I keep thinking I won’t be able to arrange the words right.
Also, I’ve not proven I can travel with someone else.
If I had liked my career at Kroger, I could have talked to my wife about it. If she liked my imaginings of an alternative life, we could have talked about that. As it turned out, we were a mostly quiet couple.
~
I told the professor one Thursday about my trumpet, which had been buried under boxes in the walk-in closet. I loved that trumpet, but I bit my nails while playing it in middle school. I hadn’t wanted to see the blood stains on the keys. Until my wife died, that is. I took it out then and made it bleat. Now I blow on it once a day.
It always sounds like a distressed animal. I blow as loudly as I can, filling my house at 873 Ravenwood with noise.
~
A man like Jeremy would use the junk that washed up on the riverbanks. Like bed springs. Once he found some bed springs that helped him complete a catapult made from cedar poles. And some baby carriage wheels, so he could roll this catapult from behind a bush.
He pulled back a long, spring-loaded pole and loosely wrapped what I thought was a grapevine around it.
“Catch it,” he yelled.
The vine made a path in the sky coming toward me. I clutched it someplace in the middle. Once it was in my hands, I realized I held a rope.
He instructed me to hold where the knot was, back up to a rock on the bank of the hill.
~
“You can come if you like,” I said to the professor.
And she came through the blue shade toward me.
Sunlight blocked by cedar trees must make a blue shade. I’m seeing everything through a blue shade. The shade must also have green and black in it, but it’s the blue I keep seeing.
The professor has long, slender fingers. Mine are stunted in comparison. But now both of our hands are rocks stuck on the rope as we prepare to swing.
“What’s the strongest feeling right now,” the professor asks me.
She smells like burnt chamomile, like disaster and calmness together.
“That I’m only now doing this,” I say.
Then we are flying, our bodies hung together, the air pushing around us.
The professor shrieks. What comes out of my mouth is a cross between a grunt and a screech, coming from someplace I had thought lost inside me.
On the other side, we drop to the ground laughing. The professor’s hair drapes over a rock.
Jeremy is smiling at us. He’s in fine shape, lanky but muscular.
“Jeremy Orr,” I say. “I’d like you to meet my professor.”
“You bastard,” he says, still smiling. “You’ve found a beautiful woman.”
I’m embarrassed. We’ve moved our desks so they make a continuous surface between us.
Jeremy pulls the rope back, wraps it around a branch. Then he leads us up the embankment.
“Jasmine was always afraid of grapevines,” I say to no one in particular.
I’m panting by the time Jeremy stops, close to the top of the hill, where it has leveled off a bit. Jeremy and the professor are not out of breath.
In school I was interested in football. I have a stocky build that could have been developed into a football player’s physique. Yet I was too afraid to try out, afraid I wasn’t good enough. An old story of mine is that I did try out for the team and went on to become a good player. Jasmine notices me in this story.
“Welcome,” Jeremy says.
I see the house now, which is almost completely blended into the landscape, the roof covered with the same bottlebrush grass and wingstem and blackberry that grow on the ground, as if his place is only a trick of elevation. Its rounded walls are the same color as the subsoil. It has no windows. To get through the doorway, Jeremy would have to stoop. Wrapped around half of the house is a porch, cedar posts holding up a scaffolding of branches and thatch. On the porch is a pile of firewood. It is split into pieces smaller than my wrist. Next to the firewood, a clay oven sits on a rock base. Steam is seeping out from the oven’s wooden door.
“Oh,” the professor says.
I dump words on him—I’m nervous—thanking him for the invitation, apologizing for not getting out sooner, wondering if he had a project he wished he had started earlier, given that the end of the world approached.
“Whoa, buddy,” Jeremy says, “I’m trying to remember if you were always so inclined toward dystopia.”
We gape at him. A gust of wind tosses a few snowflakes around us.
“You haven’t heard?” the professor asks.
“Not bread or flowers or wine. No, my friends come bearing news of the end of the world,” Jeremy says.
We tell him that deep sea mining has released a chemical into the atmosphere that will kill us and most mammals within a year. I’d stopped watching television, sick of the continuous coverage of the first few people who had died.
I’m embarrassed that I don’t have a gift for him. I never thought I would make it this far.
“You truly don’t get out,” the professor says.
“Kinda gotten out of the habit,” Jeremy says.
“And I guess our news doesn’t help you get back into it,” the professor replies.
Her eyes, they are soft now. They’ve had a surface hardness to them. I’m remembering Jasmine in the hallway outside our classroom in sixth grade, when she tossed a glance in my direction, her eyes soft like that.
“Come,” Jeremy says. “Let’s get out of the cold.
He leads us to the doorway and stops.
“No need to take off your shoes, but I’d like you to close your eyes for a minute to help them adjust. I wouldn’t want my guests to think my house is completely black.”
He laughs. There it is—Jeremy as a kid. I hear him. He’s a kid again, that same laugh. A surprising burst, then a sound like someone sliding down a staircase.
I’m closing my eyes. A din that had been in the background is drawing nearer. It could be traffic from State Road 169. But it is distant enough for it to turn into anything.
Jeremy has us duck, and he guides us into his house. He asks us to feel for a cob bench on our left. We are to sit on the cob bench and then we can open our eyes. The professor and I are clutching each other. The air is velvety, like it’s another body.
Warmth comes up from the seat. The professor exhales. The din in my head fades.
When I open my eyes, they are not overwhelmed with darkness. I can see the blunt forms of things. Jeremy is across from us. His teeth show up. He’s smiling. He’s always had such white teeth. At one end of the bench there’s a barrel with a tea kettle on top.
Jeremy is handing us wooden mugs, asking if we want to try his sassafras tea.
We do.
The tea is made from boiling sassafras root, the mugs carved from a sassafras trunk.
“The seat is warm,” I say.
My recliner is soft, but I’m more comfortable on this hand-made, warm earthen bench. Comfortable and sleepy.
“Y’all have impeccable timing,” Jeremy says. “The flue for my barrel stove runs through the cob bench. It’s most comfortable about three hours after I’ve had a fire. In fact, I was resting on it myself when I heard your bell.”
Both of my hands are holding the large wooden mug and now warmth from the steaming tea is spreading into them as well.
“You asked about a project,” Jeremy says. “I’m glad you asked about that instead of hoping for some school news.”
That laugh again.
I’m soaking in the warmth. It’s a warmth of embers.
I think they’ve stopped heating the Sylvia A. Bee Humanities building. Either that or dozens of cold bodies entering the building have lowered the temperature.
“Anyway,” Jeremy continues, “I had a window wash up. In one piece. I couldn’t believe it.”
I can move my body slightly toward the professor and avoid the direct stare of a gaunt face.
Jeremy tells us that in the spring he’s going to carve out a section of his earthen wall and build an alcove for the window. He says his walls are over a foot thick, made of clay and stray, so the sill will be deep, and the angled reveal will round the light. It will face east.
“What will you see?” asks the professor.
“I’ll see the red morning sun through the cedars,” he says.
“You’ll always look toward the coming day,” the professor says.
He laughs. “I’ll only have one window.”
He takes our mugs, tells us he will be back.
The din in my head returns. Jeremy leaves the house, and light bursts in. Its entrance sounds like a fist on a door.
Jeremy comes in carrying something. A rich, sweet, burnt aroma. He hands us each a wooden plate and a wooden fork. The thing on the plate is not visible. He tells us the sweet potatoes have been in the clay oven for three hours, that we should peel off the burnt. We do, and it’s like emerging out of blindness seeing the flesh of the sweet potatoes.
“They make their own sugar if you allow them time,” he says. “It’s about all I eat this time of year.”
He keeps talking, but the din in my head distracts me.
A boot is on the door window. Someone is using his hands to knock a boot against the door window.
“In my story,” the professor says, her voice loud, “that sweet potato looks like the morning sun.”
I concentrate on its deep, complexly sweet flavor.
“You’ll keep moving ahead, won’t you?” I ask Jeremy. I’ve drawn my breath, pursed my lips. “You’ll put that window in, right? And the days when the sun doesn’t come out? What will you see then? Tell us what you will see then.”
“There will be mist,” he says. “There will be rain and snow. I’ll see sleet and hail and slate skies.”
~
The professor moves her desk so it’s parallel with mine. We turn in our seats to face each other.
The battering on the door is awful.
She gives me her hand. Then we are holding each other. I’m trembling and happy.
Mark Schimmoeller is the author of SLOWSPOKE: A UNICYCLIST’S GUIDE TO AMERICA (Chelsea Green, 2013), which was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Creative Nonfiction. When not writing, Mark is often found cooking for his wife in a solar oven on their off-the-grid Kentucky homestead.
