The Inheritance of Almost
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
In her grandmother's kitchen drawer, beneath the rubber bands and takeout menus, she found a photograph of a woman she didn't recognize standing in this same kitchen, dated three years before her grandmother bought the house. She didn't look like her grandmother's mother. She didn't look like her grandmother's sisters. No one would look at her and think that this was their great-aunt.
The woman in the photograph had long, straight hair, an oval face, large eyes, and a nose that pointed down. It was a pretty face, one that she could see herself in. She ran her fingers through her grandmother's hairline and down the side of the photograph. Her grandmother's hair was gone now, with the hit-and-run and the chemo, her thin gray curls had fallen out and into her hands, but back then, one could pretend.
The woman in the photograph looked like she could be proud of something. She wanted to believe that about herself. She wanted to believe that the young woman in the photo was the woman who lived under the white bricks, and not the one who leaned against her elbows in the darkness of yesterday's school bus half a continent away.
She needed some answers, but she couldn't ask these questions too loudly. Not yet. Because she'd only lived in this town for forty-eight hours and she didn't know the woman's name. If she learned the woman's name, the door would be flung open from the other side by one of the women in her high school class or in her apartment complex. And the wound would seep in gibberish, blood and teeth and broken bones lost in fifty common words, because she didn't know this woman's name. She couldn't hide in the crowd with one word.
* * * * * * *
Whisper, whisper, distance in space, for she did not know them here. Not yet. She only knew how the yellow curbs stretched through the moonlight and how her grandmother's tenant's door banged beneath her size-fourteen feet,◆ About the ending
❧ About the title