Postcards to Limbo by Aaron Buchanan
Kristina looked at Interstate 80 as a buttress that kept the United States from collapsing in on itself. She never knew why. It stretched from New York City all the way to San Francisco, from one distant foreign world to an entirely different one. Some miles south of the house she grew up in, in Limbo, Kristina slid in her mom’s favorite CD—ELO’s Greatest Hits—and drove to the gas station in Red Crow. The CD skipped on the back end—the beginning of “Telephone Line”— and got worse over the last four songs. But she’d never get rid of it. Her mom had earned those scratches. And when the car’s player paused and tried to make sense of the track, Kristina thought maybe she could hear her mom in the space and void. At the Shell in Red Crow, Kristina Monahan leaned against her car, arms folded as the gas pumped into her mom’s Chevy SUV, and thought about her dad who had not seen her off and had not said goodbye. Kristina hadn’t spoken to him since her mom’s funeral six months ago. At first she thought his continued silence was because of her operation; how when her mom was dying, she spent her savings on Kristina’s gender reassignment telling her husband he had plenty of his own money to retire on in a few years. Bill Monahan acted like he couldn’t pronounce the word transgender, and in St. Tom County, it wasn’t a word bandied about very
often—even in 2002. Instead, Bill said transvestite. He spat it out. Stuttered it rather than said. And even though Kristina’s brother had married young and moved out and her sister moved to San Francisco, Kristina stayed and cared for their mom until the end. Her father said nothing as his wife passed away or as the old version of Kristina receded away. But he never told her to leave his house. So, Kristina held the hope that he was the same man he was when they were kids; the man who had used three-by-five index cards to write little notes and sketch out doodles and put them in their lunch boxes. The cards might say I love you or learn stuff today. He’d kept it going until Ruby went to junior high. Kristina was in fifth grade. Her little brother, Dennis, was in fourth. He stopped abruptly. He’d never done them every day. Just once or twice a week. Every so often he’d tape a quarter or a half-dollar to the card. Kristina envisioned herself sitting in the school cafeteria, recalling Mrs. Fellows and her glass eye, wondering what had happened or if she or Ruby or Dennis had done something to make him stop. Kristina kept a Roman coin she’d inherited from her grandpa in her pocket for good luck. Using one hand to steer, she pulled the coin out, rubbed at it through its clear vinyl pouch, felt LITERARY-ARTS MAGAZINE | 17
