Thanks Paige for sharing with me an image of #fadedglory here is your story. This tale has now been recorded. Let me read it to you at Insta TV @erinmccuskey or scroll to the bottom to watch.

The brick wall behind the Luxville Post Office ran the length of the street. It was bright yellow from one end to the other. Well, apart from the tagging, texta markings, poster remnants, parking signs, declarations of love, dust, tyre rubber and grime. Maybe once bright yellow, now it was dingy yellowed mustard.

Jack Davies was a postie. He rode his post bike past this yellowed wall about fifty-eight million times a day. Today he had already ridden past forty million times but this he stopped.

The sky of azure, pink and gold arrested him. It made Jack feel like he was looking at the ocean with the world upside-down. The ribbon of clouds were peaks of waves and the trees that blocked it, the seaweed.

But Jack had only ever seen the ocean once when he was a kid. His family had taken summer holidays at the Lerne Hotel, an hour from Luxville. It meant travelling in a car packed full of kids and dogs and beach gear and seeing every other family from Luxville once you got there. The following year they went in the other direction, to the mountains, and every summer after that.

Jack had daydreamed all the way to his first stop. He pulled out a letter to drop it into a green and blue mailbox shaped like a little house. It stood in front of a full-size house of green and blue.

The letter was in an envelope the colour of dusky plums, the address was handwritten fine cursive in blue black ink. He could feel the love in the pressure of the pen.

As he dropped the letter into the roof of the mailbox, the front door of the big house opened. Two children raced towards him with a little cream dog nipping at their heels. The children wore white knee-highs and matching tartan skirts. They screeched in that scalp lifting register that only children can summon.

They ran to the fence waving at Jack but taking aim at the building works that had begun across the way. It was a grey brick building surrounded by caution tape and a yellow notice of its imminent removal. The old signs proclaimed it a long-lost milk bar. The fluoro lights blinked and cackled. But the kids thought it wonderous, they couldn’t see the faded glory, dereliction nor loss.

And looking at it in that moment Jack thought it wonderous too. He took a moment to imprint the vision for safe keeping. He knew exactly what the yellowed wall of the Post Office needed – the fearless wonder of children and another Luxville ghost story. That night he got out his paints.

LUXVILLE TALES story by Erin McCuskey | image by Paige of artist Darren Newby’s work.

The #LuxvilleTales are generated from reader contributed images. Submissions have now closed.