The Blue Water of the Kitchen Sink
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The photograph showed her mother standing in a kitchen that no longer existed, holding a knife mid-chop, looking up at whoever held the camera with an expression Elena couldn't name—surprise, perhaps, or the beginning of a question she never got to finish. The date stamped in orange numbers: 03-14-1987. Elena was not yet born. She touched the surface, the way she always did, and this time the emulsion gave, slightly, like skin over a pulse. The emulsion bit on her fingertip and made its mark. Darkened, then black.
The photograph, which her father had insisted on keeping tattooed in an album on which he rarely ever looked, a book that he had thought impossible to get wet, a relic hedged in by willpower and hearsay, was now soaked. Elena winced to see the thin orange margins of the photograph flap open, as though in surrender, its paper face pulled back like a razor blade drawn in blood. The book had to stay underwater while she moved what was left of her family to the safety of a table or a stove, or the ceiling, if that was possible. It was clear, even to her, that they had only a few minutes before they began to disintegrate; that each second she spent, shifting them from tattered page to cloth, only risked more destruction. But to leave them there in the blue water of the kitchen sink was to deny the reality: that to stop touching them was to lose them forever. It was impossible for her to choose between the two. She held each photograph in fragments, stroking each pitiful strip of space over some collective wound, and too afraid to finish pulling apart the dark. She didn't know to what end. She only knew her heart was already open wide with an urgency to replace broken parts with what she had found. She turned them over. New image. Same fear.
Dead in Barcelona
Born in Barcelona,
Spain in the year 1933,
before Spain split into
two halves, Generalísimo
Franco living in one
and Lorca in the other,
nobody in either half
wishing to push the war to
an end where piles of corpses
would block the guerilla army
sucking air a mile deep
into a mountain,
never to be seen again.
Or to be seen again only
as smoke rising in
a breeze too strong for
light, gently moving branches
in a tree, but where the heck
was the◆ About the ending
❧ About the title