Runner-up in the 1st Annual Geist Literal Literary Postcard Story Contest.

All your life you fantasize. When you are ten, you wrap yourself in great lengths of curtain and stay out past your eight o’clock bedtime. You imagine yourself exotic and unrecognizable to your mother, who comes screeching down the street of your Scottish village bemoaning the loss of her favourite sheers.

At twenty-one, you travel to Nepal and trek the Himalayas for five weeks. You imagine yourself mysterious and unique when Sherpa women splay their fingers and touch their open palms to your mop of ginger hair.

At forty-three, you fall in love with Delhi. You crave her colours, her heat, her crush and press. You imagine yourself betrothed. You wail your devotion one hundred thousand times the number of her mass and lie prostrate on her temple floors.

At eighty-seven, you unravel and marry. You envelop yourself in red and gold, adorn your glad feet with silver, and dance.