by Alex MOODY

When they asked me to put to­geth­er mock-ups of the post­card idea — Elvis next to a plate of his fa­vorite food, recipe float­ing in the up­per left-hand cor­ner in an un­ob­tru­sive sans serif font from the Grace­land-sup­plied cat­a­log of eight au­tho­rized fonts — I jumped on the project. A com­bi­na­tion of can­did Elvis head­shots next to ten­der roast beef would cer­tain­ly rock­et off the racks on Beale Street. More im­por­tant­ly, the cards would jump-start the “Print World, While It Lasts!” por­tal of my ad­mit­ted­ly slim on­line de­sign portfolio.

I sup­pose post­card recipes are what hap­pens when you’re faced with a fi­nite amount of ma­te­r­i­al to pro­mote. There’s noth­ing new on the way. You work with what you’ve got, ex­haust­ing in­con­gru­ous com­bi­na­tions as long as they sell, or un­til the mar­ket, or sim­ple prob­a­bil­i­ty, con­spires to prove to you that this is it: the end of the line. If Be­lin­da in prod­uct de­vel­op­ment craved Elvis-food-themed post­cards, as if all the ref­er­ences to Elvis and overeat­ing and ex­cess were wiped from our cul­tur­al mem­o­ries in one swift ed­i­to­r­i­al karate chop, well, so be it.

But af­ter nail­ing, just nail­ing, two post­cards — roast beef: in­tense eye con­tact, hint of mirth lin­ger­ing on the lips, un­laced blue top, arms crossed, slab of cooked beef (cut and grade un­known), di­a­bol­i­cal­ly red toma­toes, five-line recipe, out­lines of mu­si­cal notes float­ing in the back­ground; and cher­ry pie: same back­ground, same for­mat, big smile, hands open, Elvis want­ed this pie, you can tell, he was smil­ing so much, I made it that way on pur­pose, you will want to try this recipe, I am that good at post­cards — I came to an un­com­fort­ably long spaghet­ti recipe and on­ly had one de­cent re­main­ing sam­ple im­age to use. Same back­ground as the roast beef card, but with red-or­ange hues to play off the saucy plate of noo­dles and meat­balls. Elvis’s white shirt popped, too, and his as­cot, with rich Caber­net tones, in­tro­duced a lev­el of grav­i­tas not found on the oth­er cards.

How­ev­er, this was a Pen­sive Elvis shot. You know the one. He wasn’t chal­leng­ing me, guard­ing the last hunks of roast beef, and he wasn’t ec­sta­t­ic, as with his sick­ly sweet cher­ry pie en­thu­si­asm. He stared to his right, not at the pedes­tri­an plate of spaghet­ti but some­where above it and five thou­sand miles away. Like some­thing was chas­ing him, as if the recipe wasn’t there and this whole en­deav­or was about flight, not feast­ing, this was about run­ning and run­ning and run­ning as long as you can and right then as I had that thought… click. I closed my Pho­to­shop win­dow and shivered.

I called up Be­lin­da at Grace­land and left a mes­sage on her clunky an­swer­ing ma­chine, “I’m afraid I’m too busy to work on the post­cards. You should prob­a­bly as­sign that whole deal to some­one else, some­one less busy and pre­oc­cu­pied as my­self, as I seem to be. Thank you and goodbye.”

Be­lin­da re­turned my call while I was out run­ning sprints at forty-five de­gree an­gles across the park and she re­quest­ed all the files back, told me to delete every­thing I’d worked on, if I’d worked on any­thing, and I did, sweat still drip­ping from my chin on to my key­board, I delet­ed it all, even the draft ver­sion of Pen­sive Spaghet­ti Elvis and I swore I’d nev­er look be­hind me again not like that not like he did be­cause we all know what hap­pened don’t ever look back be­cause there’s on­ly one thing af­ter you I mean re­al­ly af­ter youin the strictest mean­ing of the phrase like what comes af­ter youand that is noth­ing noth­ing nothing.

Filed under Fiction on January 28th, 2011

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