The Family Portrait After the Image Files Started Forgetting
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
The photo on the mantel developed a crack that bled tiny pixels like midnight snow. By morning, Uncle Ray’s left eye had drifted off the paper entirely and was blinking from inside the glass bulb of the table lamp. By evening, Nana’s wig had seized control over the the digital converter box. It has an appetite for rotten peanut butter, which it likes to lick off the TV screen. The lamp is still searching the house for its missing eye, stopping occasionally to cough dandruff onto the tracks of a busy railroad intersection. The rubber eyes of one of my sister’s stuffed dogs have healed themselves with Uncle Ray’s eyegoo, and are now playing peeper-tag with numerous candycorns.
I myself have developed a small tickertape embedded in my wrist that prints out the time of day in the ancient calendars of poopclock and peanut scales. They are illegible in salad dressing. I should have laughed more when Nana was alive. I should have told her I loved her, her spirit now insensible to meaning, tangled in the blink of the pioneer gods. The androgen levels of most fish are way up these days. Shellfish are the worst. There are chemicals we pack and ship inappropriately with cans of peaches and nuclear fission bananas. The crack from the photograph is still crawling. It is writing a rock opera to be performed by the subconsciously dead. I’m afraid to put my new Internet Explorer CD into the D drive because my cat may emerge from the clicking.
I don’t know who this uncle is, or why he’s wedged inside the breadbox. I feel like I know him. There’s something about his eyes….◆ About the ending
❧ About the title