Song 20260816-180010
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The archive arrived water-damaged, and she spent three days drying the photographs between sheets of blotting paper before she realized none of them showed faces she recognized, though the handwriting on the backs was unmistakably her own. It had been years since she’d seen written images of the woman and little girl in front of her door, or the man who stopped her like she was a child to pose her beside a white animal shelter sign. A brief swoon, table set for invisible people who had only a picture each. She dried the other images to determine that she recognized only one person in them: the woman she’d spoken over the phone back when they’d both lived in the New York years before alphabetical filing had followed her.
Some damage she couldn’t undo: these photographs. She blinked. Noticed an effort of intention, that voice on a long cord, which said Sonja had, I presume, kept to her side of the thin partition that separated them that day in the kitchen; she had not asked for the photographs.
Stephanie Clinton Skerrett writes and lives in San Francisco.
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From Mass MoCA, "Of Statues and Songs," is a multi-billion-dollar industry, a living monument to digital dependency and communal inequity, or a well-crafted apparition of our collective trauma. It's a reminder◆ About the ending