Blue Postcards

Welcome to our regular feature showcasing the talents of the nation’s best writers.

4. Years ago in the blue mists of memory, there was a street in Paris called the Street of Tailors. Men sat outside their shops like kings on their thrones, and they nodded to each other or tipped their broad-brimmed hats and said, ‘Shalom,’ and smiled. There were also dressmakers on that street and gentlemen’s outfitters and cloth merchants. Then one day the whole street disappeared and all the people in it.

5. Now that street has a different name though there is a tailor there and he wears a shawl some days, fringed with tassels. Four of the tassels each have, according to the law written in his book, a blue thread running through it. The man’s name is Henri and he works in the shop, taking down the measurements of men’s inside legs and the width of their shoulders and the thickness of their waists. He writes all these measurements down in a leather-bound ledger that is kept locked in a safe as though it is a book of secrets.

6. I remember standing at a stall beside the Eiffel Tower. The sky was so blue it hurt to look at it. I stopped by the stall because it offered shade from an awning that stretched above three fold-down tables. On one table there were boxes of postcards in some sort of arrangement. They were old postcards – pictures of Paris over the years. I leafed through them, idly, in order to justify my sheltering. One card caught my eye.

7. It was a blue postcard. Completely blue on one side, a blank and eternal blue – though the paper was a little yellowed and cracked and the corners of the card rounded. On the reverse side, on the left, the postcard had a message in French, on the right a name and address. It carried a stamp in the top right-hand corner, a stamp that was completely blue; it had been franked and was dated 14 May 1957. I do not think the girl serving at the stall knew what she had. It was priced at one euro.

About the author

Douglas Bruton has been published in various publications including Northwords Now, New Writing Scotland, Aestetica and The Irish Literary Review. His short stories have won competitions including Fish and The Neil Gunn Prize and he has had two novels published, The Chess Piece Magician and Mrs Winchester’s Gun Club. Blue Postcards, his new novel written as a series of 500 numbered, postcard-size paragraphs, is published by Fairlight, price £7.99