Jud
The girl in the picture smiled up at Jud, her short hair drawing attention to her full lips and big eyes. He wondered if that was why she'd cut it, if her beauty had been less noticeable when her hair was long and flowing, if it distracted from her pretty face. Maybe she'd been sick and had to get it cut that way. Maybe she'd hated it at first, but eventually decided to keep it short once she realized how lovely it looked. He wished he could ask her about it, and she'd tell him the whole story in a bright, chirpy voice like she was happy to talk to him.
He was grateful for his pictures on nights like that, grateful that girls were willing to pose for them, just to make life interesting for men like him.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to focus. He'd long ago discovered that having something to concentrate on made it easier to keep the other thoughts away, the unwanted thoughts that wormed into his mind more and more often. The thoughts of the stupid thing he could do. How easy it would be to put his Colt .45 against his temple and never have to worry about Laurey again. He wished he could read well enough to be distracted by some story in a book, maybe find something there to give him hope. But all he had were his postcards, so he made do. He made up his own stories about the girls, gave them names, came up with stories behind why they posed the way they did, and how they felt about it. He could pretend their poses, props, and costumes were real, like he was looking at pictures of actual harem girls in palaces or like some photographer had coincidentally happened upon two beautiful women kissing each other on a park bench.
He put the picture of the short-haired girl at the bottom of the stack, so he was face to face with a woman cupping her extraordinarily full breasts. She seemed happy with them, they probably made her stand out anywhere she went. Maybe when she was out and about, she wore tight corsets around her waist to further draw people's attention to her figure.
With more and more pictures, he managed to keep himself sane, kept himself drunk too, until he could justify putting it off. Told himself he'd do it till the next day. If he did it that night, he might miss, after all. He might blow his ear off, or his jaw instead. Laurey might love him if he went through with it properly; she'd sing sad songs at his funeral, remember him at his best, regret all the times she ignored him, knowing that she'd been the cause of what he'd done. But if she didn't pay him any mind now, she certainly wouldn't get any friendlier towards him if he were stupid enough to shoot off part of his face.
Once the images on the postcards became blurry, he lay down on his narrow bed, hoping sleep would at least give him some reprieve like it did most nights when he dreamed of Laurey. In his last few seconds of wakefulness, he thought it might be possible for the next day to be, not better, that was too much to wish for, but…different.