by Kathryn Kulpa

After I was sick and before I was cured, I stayed at the Blue Hills Residential Treatment Center on Orr’s Island. My job while I was there (we all had one) was shelving books in the library. It was dull enough that I volunteered to do other things, like catalog the postcards stuffed randomly into shoeboxes. 

We weren’t allowed access to a lot of things: fashion magazines, internet, some music, most TV. I read old books, looked at old postcards. There was something haunted about them, post-apocalyptic: empty streets, deserted hillsides, beaches swept clean of any trace of human life. When people did appear they seemed fixed in place, like taxidermied animals. I thought of that Bob Dylan song about selling postcards of the hanging. I didn’t know until years later that he was singing about things that actually happened, that towns sent photographers to lynchings and people would pose next to the dangling bodies, smiling. 

There were a lot of things I didn’t know. 

The postcards in the Blue Hills archives didn’t show hangings, but I was surprised how many of them showed the asylum, which was what Blue Hills used to be before it became an eating disorder clinic. Bulimia Hills, some of the girls called it. The repeaters, mostly. The girls whose defiant collarbones and cheek hollows we watched fearfully and still envied. 

One postcard showed the same view I had from my window. You could almost pretend it was a vacation resort, not an island you couldn’t leave. Pines ringed a distant lake, a rundown hill spotted with thistle and clover. It even looked like the same sagging volleyball net in the corner, though it could have been a fence. The colors were muted and slubby, like they’d been painted over the original sepia, and in some places brown showed through. 1908, said the postmark. It was addressed to Mr. George Schroeder. Hope you are keeping Gladys a Good girl! Someone had written on the narrow white space on the front of the card. 

In those days, I had time to wonder about everything I didn’t know, and I wondered about Gladys. I wondered if Gladys had been a bad girl, and was the card a threat—this is where we’ll send you, Gladys, if you don’t straighten up and fly right—or was it a coded message the girl who wrote it wanted Gladys to see? Somehow I knew it was a girl who wrote it, that Blue Hills had always been a place for bad girls, strange girls, girls who refused to make their beds and fold their clothes, girls who locked themselves in towers to starve and cut their hair so no prince could climb up and save them, girls who took chances, girls who cast spells, girls who walked the primrose path, girls who called down Hell’s fury on boys who did them wrong, wicked girls, wild girls, girls like me. 

Once there was a girl who wrote a message on a postcard of an asylum, in thin, spidery script, in faded brown ink. Where had that girl gone? Had George kept her good? Put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well?

I’d never know. There were 305 postcards in that shoebox. Gladys’s was number 217. I hope you didn’t stay a good girl, Gladys. I hope you were bad to the bone.