The postcard rack

An original imagined travel essay about stopping at a service station.

Between the sandwiches and the road atlases stood a rack of places having better weather. Their seas were an unreasonable blue. Their windows were open to flowers, and their streets appeared to have negotiated a permanent holiday from delivery vans.

Outside, the service-station forecourt held a damp lorry and three people searching the same bag. I had been travelling since early morning. My own reflection in the glass door suggested that the postcards had been wise not to include me.

I turned the rack. A mountain arrived, then a harbour, then a village arranged around a church as neatly as a family prepared for a photograph. Each small scene offered a place to stand without requiring me to finish the journey there. For a minute, the road lost its instructions.

The postcards were not convincing as promises. I knew that the harbour must sometimes have bins and that somebody had to carry deliveries through the village. Their pleasure was smaller and more immediate: a bright rectangle in which I could briefly place my tired attention.

I returned the rack to its first sea. Then I took my drink outside and watched a driver rescue a loose receipt from beneath a wheel. The sky above the lorry was clearing in one ordinary corner. I found that I wanted to look at it for a while.

Examine the methods the writer uses to present the brief pleasure offered by the postcard rack.