The Small Backs of Children

The Girl

You must picture your image of Eastern Europe. In your mind’s eye. Whatever that image is. However it came to you. Winter. That white. .

One winter night when she is no longer a child, the girl walks outside, her shoes against snow, her arms cradling a self, her back to a house not her own but some other. It is a year after the blast that has atomized her entire family in front of her eyes. She is six. It is a house she has lived in with a widow woman who took her in — orphan of war, girl of nothingness.

But that night has never left her. . it is an unrelenting bruise. Its blue-black image pearling in and out of memory forever. Nor will it ever leave her body, the blast forever injuring her spine, a sliver of metal piercing her flesh and entering her, so that all her life she will carry the trace of that moment between her vertebrae.

And then again her mind moves to the moment of the blast, the singular fire lighting up the face of her father, her mother, first white, then yellow, then orange and blue, then black, then nothing, her head swiveled by the force of the blow away from them. This does not frighten her. What used to be nightmares have transformed into color and light, composition and story. It is with her now. Lifelong companion. Still life of a dead family.

The snow begs her senses now, and she wishes she had a coat. She wishes she had tied her shoes properly, worn proper socks. The moon, however, makes an entire setting for her motion, and in this way she feels. . lit up.

She hears something not her and not the night and not the white expanse waiting before her. Her feet are cold and she can suddenly feel how numb her hands are, shoved in her armpits. She does not know, at first, what she is hearing. At first it seems like the sound of hummingbirds’ wings, but that is not possible. A fluttering whir, quiet as secrets, there and then gone.

She remembers her father: his eyes, his word.

She hears it again, then, and knows it — a wolf caught in a trap. She looks down near the fence line. It is a wolf, beyond beautiful, with its leg caught in a trap. She moves closer, aware now of how the cold is biting into her. She studies the wolf. The wolf is smart. It is almost finished. She thinks, in only the briefest of thoughts, of releasing it.

The wolf is nearly free.

In its freedom it will lose a leg.

It will be worth it.

She holds perfectly still.

More still than a dead person.

Which she has seen, many times — a corpse in snow.

She watches the wolf chew its own leg by the light of the moon, by the rhythm of its journey. The moon makes its slow arc in the sky, and inside the moon’s movement, reflected in the girl’s eyes, the wolf finally frees itself.

It is then that she does something pure bodied. Child minded. She goes to where the rust-orange and black metal of the trap sits holding its severed limb, to where blood and animal labor have reddened and dirtied the pristine white of the snow — like the violence against a canvas. There, without thinking, she pulls down her pants, her underwear, squats with primal force, and pisses and pisses where the crime happened. A steam cloud moves upward from the snow and the blood as the relief of rising heat warms her skin.

Her eyes close.

Her mouth fills with spit.

This is how the sexuality of a girl is formed — an image at a time — against white; taboo, thoughtless, corporeal.

She opens her eyes.

The piss smell and the blood smell and the youth smell of her skin mingle. She licks her lips.

The wolf runs.

It runs three legged, like all damaged creatures, across the snow.

She thinks: this is true.

She thinks: this is a life.

She thinks: I do not want to die, but my life will always be like this — wounded and animal, lurching against white. She bends down and rubs her hands in the blood. She lifts her hands, her eyes, her heart to the heavens, in the space where they say god is, a god she has never known, a god she will replace with something else. Her small hands make what might look to an outsider like a prayer shape. But she is not praying.

She closes her eyes. This is the night it happens. She looks down at her red hands. She laughs, up. She bends down and wrenches the severed limb from the trap. And then she runs toward a self.

What is a girl but this? This obscene and beautiful making against the expanse of white. This brilliant imagination, inventing meaning.

The Writer

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

What a crock. Virginia, fuck you, old girl, old dead girl.

I am in a midnight blue room. A writing room. A room of my own making — with its rituals and sanctuary. I can see my husband and son in the next room fiddling with a video camera. Looking at them together makes my heart feel crushed like a wad of paper. I reach down below my desk and pull up a bottle of scotch. My scotch. Balvenie. Thirty year. I pour myself a shot. I drink. Warm lips, throat. I close my eyes. I am not Virginia Woolf. Do you know how many women can’t afford the room, or have no help, or scratch away at things in bars, buses, closets? I much prefer a different line of yours, anyway: Arrange whatever pieces come your way. Or this: Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

I know something about death.

Inside everything I have ever written, there is a girl. Sometimes she is dead, and haunts the story like a ghost. Sometimes she is an orphan of war. Sometimes she is just wandering. Maybe the girl is a metaphor, or maybe she is me, or maybe a character who keeps coming.

I write her and write her.

Sometimes I think I am following her into another place or self. She is leading me. Directing the traffic of my life.

I’ve always been suspicious of narrators. And of characters, for that matter. Of the figures of speech we create to stand in for people. Or selves. There is something weird and unnatural about them — how they do what we tell them, how they obey. I don’t trust them. Narrators especially. Chickenshits.

I have been someone else many times.

I was a competitive swimmer for eighteen years.

I was a secretary in a lawyer’s office for a year and a half.

I was a waitress for eight days.

I was a heroin addict for six years. China White.

I was married two times — eleven years, first, and now going on thirteen.

I have slept with women for twenty years.

I have slept with men all my life — from the time I can first remember things — if by sleeping with men one means sexual encounters with men and their dicks.

My father figures here.

My mother’s suicide attempts happened when I was eight, eighteen, and twenty-eight. Before she got it right.

I flunked out of college once, quit twice, then battled my way through to the telos of a Ph.D. Became a teacher of literary things. Whatever those things are.

I have been drinking scotch for twenty-six years. Balvenie, thirty year.

Off and on.

I was incarcerated the first time as a minor for eighteen months.

I was incarcerated the second time, of age, for eight months.

I was incarcerated the third time for eight nights.

I was a mother the first time for nine months, just nine, then the mother of a dead daughter. Now I am the mother of a son. Strange and alive boy.

I was depressed at age eight for one year, but it just felt like being underwater, which was familiar to me, the swimmer. I was depressed the second time at age eleven for two years, then again at eighteen for one more. Then I went under — depression — second self — and resurfaced violently. Recurringly.

Everyone I love is an artist. None of us knows what we mean. Oh, we pretend that we do. Some of us win prizes and lift strangely off the surface of things; others of us toil away, making our own labor into an overrighteous romance. Some of us have jobs, or tenure, or family; some of us are rich, others ride the grant trains; some of us are homeless or nomads, others addicts or recovering or lapsing. Aren’t we all just shooting for a life where art matters?

What a cast we make.

My brother the New York playwright, winner of American status, seizer of material wealth.

My now-husband the filmmaker, driven to create images for audiences who long for escape from that other movie, life.

My onetime lover the war photojournalist, image purist, traumatized by her own shooting star.

My friend the performance artist, generational do-over, her youth our only chance at passing something on. Fake legacy.

My dearest and fiercest friend, the poet, lover of women and sexual excess and language.

My ex-husband the painter, who held in one hand a brush he used to create new worlds, and held in the other the gun he tried to shoot me with.

We make art, but in relation to what exactly? All the artists we admired from the past came out of the mouths of wars and crises. Life and Death. We come out of high capitalism. Consumerist monsterhood. Even when our lives went to shit, they were still just our lives. Our puny, overdramatic, American lives. And where we are from — our so-called country, defined by the smell of a well-made latte, the silent hum of an all-consuming war machine, and the televised face of Oprah — are we for something? Against something?

All our artistic origins have been atomized. Dead fathers and brave mothers against the kitsch and speed of this glossy and disposable new century.

I love them all. I write them all. Does love make art?

What is the story of a self? What is chronology? The history of a life? Which story should I tell to make a narrator, an American woman writer at forty-five — which plot, which pathos? Because any writer’s life knots are embedded in whatever story they tell.

I have invented hundreds of selves. Men and women.

I have peopled the entire corpus of my experience with fictions.

Who is to say they are not I? I them?

And if I tell the truth, this once, will it be any different from all the other tellings? How? In what sense would it matter?

We are who we imagine we are.

Every self is a novel in progress.

Every novel a lie that hides the self.

This, reader, is a mother-daughter story.

The Violence of Children

When violence comes to the door of a child’s house it is not comprehensible to her. Even if she has some small awareness of the war or violence or danger surrounding them, the truth is that the faces and hands of the people in her family, the horses in the barn, the mouse she is secretly keeping as a pet, the potatoes frozen underground, the kick ball made from animal skin and straw and twine, the glass in the windows and the shivering walls of the house are infinitely more real to her. She cannot help it. The sound of a mother’s voice singing her to sleep, the alto of a father reading a poem, the smell of a brother’s skin just before dreams, the moon’s giant eye, all of these overshadow whatever violence is at the door. Think of Anne Frank writing about trees.

When violence came to the village near the girl’s family’s house, there was no stopping it coming to her door, her body, as well. The six-year-old body of a girl.

Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn: You move or scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them. Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier’s cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead.

Counting.

In the world around them, violences became perpetual. Men were sent to icehouse prisons. Women and children were raped repeatedly. Children were bought and sold on the open market. Systemized violence became part of ordinary experience, so that it was not unusual to see — not blood and body parts, but displaced fear and horror in micromotions. The tremor of a hand or the twitch of an eye; bullet marks in the side of a house; women with scars around their eyes and mouths as deep as archeological finds; little boys who could not sit in chairs.

There were blood and body parts too.

And the end to reality every other day.

America — that great maker of realities — blind and deaf to all of it.

A story that never existed, since no one ever saw it represented.

And then, one day, her family was blown to bits.

An inconsequential blast.

Just an anonymous explosion.

Behind the girl, a photojournalist on a prestigious assignment. In that moment the girl’s mouth opened wide as a child’s scream, but no scream emerged, either in the instant of the blast or forever after. Her breath caught in her lungs like an animal’s. Her eyes locked, her skin blanched, bloodless, her hands and arms flying upward, without control.

There were people around on that day to whom she could have run. There were, of course, soldiers; surely even amid their brutality there was one kind heart, one man who could still remember his family and would at least send her to an orphanage. There were other people nearby, neighbors from the village, watching or hiding. And, without her seeing them, there were foreigners: underground photojournalists chasing the perfect image, reporters dying to lasso the story, “human rights” workers milling about in “safe houses.”

But she did not run toward any people. None of the people there had anything to do with her. When the blast happened, she ran to the woods. In her smallness and her quickness she disappeared, a girl’s body torn from the heart of love.

What luck for the photographer. To be so accidentally present. And what cocksure instincts, her editor would say. Right on the money. You can see how she got the assignment.

We think of children as innocent and helpless, she scribbled on a note to her editor, but really this is and isn’t true. Think of how many children survive the darkest atrocities and violences. Hundreds of thousands of children. Armies of them. Not news. She folded the note in two and sealed it in with the undeveloped film before handing it over to the press shipper.

In the moment of the blast, the girl could have died with her family.

But she did not.

And so, now, she runs.

In her running, her mind leaves her.

And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.

There is a great white silent empty in her running.

She runs.

She runs to the dark oncoming line of the forest.

Her hands making little man fists of anger.

The edge of the forest coming into focus.

Her teeth clenching in her mouth.

The moon, Ménuo, big white eye in the dark.

It is snowing.

Miraculously, the snow will cover her tracks.

The branches of trees opening their arms.

Her panting.

Finally the forest holds her.

She keeps running.

The forest is black and white — illuminated through the trees by the moon.

She runs until her legs and lungs cry child.

She stops.

She looks up at the night sky, visible through the treetops.

She looks at her own breath making fog in front of her face.

Then she walks and walks, placing her hands on the bark of trees for courage.

Tree by tree, her breathing comes back to her.

She has no thoughts, just this body.

The forest is made of tunnels. Each tunnel opens into a deeper place in the woods, and the deeper she goes, the more surefooted she feels. Many times she has been hunting in these woods, and even as her mind is filled with cotton and electricity she knows she is far from alone. There are, for one thing, trees. And animals. Deer, rabbits, hawks, wolves. Ménuo, the moon. And Saulé, on the other side of the night, the sun mother, goddess of all misfortunates, especially orphans. And Aušrine, the morning star, and Vakeriné, the evening star.

And of course the rebel camps.

So when her legs have nothing left, and her skin is as cold as a dead person’s, it is fortuitous that she is knocked to the ground by a boy made into a man by war. She thuds thankfully in a small heap to the forest floor. He puts the long hard of his rifle against her throat, which she cannot feel. He shines a flashlight in her face. He smells of boy and rifle and dirt and sweat. She cannot see him and is glad. She makes her body limp, she makes her eyes dead, and then she loses consciousness, smiling.

When she wakes, she is inside a small makeshift tent. She is on the dirt of a floor, covered with blankets. Her feet and hands and cheeks feel very hot and they sting. A woman wearing the clothing of a man is petting her head, saying ssshhh. Almost like a mother. Drink this. She sees a submachine gun hanging from the woman’s shoulder, rocking slightly, accompanying the woman’s voice. In the corner of the tent, a man is being dressed in women’s clothing, his gun and knife at his gut being wrapped with scarves. Then she sleeps again.

The next morning the sun is there and the woman is gone, and there is the same manboy with a rifle standing over her. She can smell it’s true. He gives her a nudge in the ribs with his foot. Get up, he says. She gets up and finds that she is wearing heavy boys’ clothes. He hands her a pair of boots that have straw and leaves stuffed into them. Then he tells her that he and another man will take her to the edge of the forest. Do not cry, he says. You are lucky to be alive. Luckier still not to be in a Gulag, little pig. I said we should put you in a hole in the ground to watch for the enemy — you could squeal if you saw anything. If you cannot fight, you are nothing. I said we should use you as bait. He spits on the ground. Then he takes his dick out and pisses right near her feet. The steam rises between them. I said we should kill you. I don’t care if you live or die.

She is not scared. She can hear him and she concentrates so hard on his face and mouth she can feel her eyes become bullets. She wants the boots. Violently. She wants the coat — stained and torn and smelling of piss. He grabs his dick and moves toward her and she readies herself to go dead, but he just rubs it on her arm. Harder. Faster. The reddened muscle of a boy. She counts the dead air. Soon he comes in a hard hot spurt on the coat. She puts the coat on without hesitation, looking him in the eye. There is a scarf on the ground with some of his piss seeping into it that she would snatch up even if it were on fire. She wraps and wraps it around her head, covering everything but her eyes. She wants the pouch of dried-up bread, the canteen of dirty water, the broken knife. She wants everything he is giving to her.

They march her to the edge of the forest. They point to a spot across the whitened landscape. They say there is a farm there. From where they are, the spot looks like it could be anything. Or nothing. She begins to walk. She could be walking into a whitened oblivion. She wonders if they will shoot her after all. She thinks she hears them laughing. She turns only once to look back. He is pointing his rifle at her. She sees a wolf out of the corner of her eye, watching her, or maybe all of them, as it backs into the forest and she moves slowly forward, toward some unseen form in the distance.

The Writer

My daughter. Say it — hold it in your mouth, look at the words: born dead.

To be told there is no pulse at the precise threshold of birth — water breaking. To be told to deliver anyway. Death.

The day birth came at last, the labor had lasted two days. I nearly gave in. I kept thinking, To what end? It seemed true that at any point I could simply surrender to the pain of an ordinary body and. . leave. I looked at the people around me — my eyes puffy, my skin done in — and thought, I love you, I love you all, enough, good-bye. But I did not leave, and the dead girl was born.

I expected her to be blue, and cold. Lifeless. I expected her to feel dead weighted. I expected to die, quietly and with soft breathing, from holding her.

But she was not blue, and she was not cold; she was like the weight of the history of love in my arms. Her skin was flushed and her eyelashes were very, small, long. Her lips were in the hue and shape of a rosebud. Her hair. . she had a small halo of almost-hair. And her hands were curled in the shape of something tender and potential. I was holding life and death — those supposed opposites, those markers of narrative worth; a beginning, an ending — all at once in my arms.

I did not die.

But I could see the grief coming like a towering wave of water about to swallow the world. When grief comes, you must breathe underwater. I knew I didn’t have much time. You know, hospitals will not allow you to take a dead baby home with you. You must make arrangements, with the hospital or with a coroner or a morgue. They send in “grief counselors,” and, if you let them, god help you, clergymen.

I just wanted her body. I wanted her body more than I have ever wanted anything in my life. And so I did what I had to do.

I asked the poet — my lifelong rival, beloved friend, a borderline criminal — to steal her from that fucking place for me.

You will think it sounds impossible, but it was not. It was laughably simple. The poet was close friends with an attendant, an addict, at the morgue where I agreed to send her. The morgue had its own crematorium. In lieu of her lifeless body, a little pig covered in a soft blanket was sent down the metal road to the fire.

Instead, I took her to a place where a river empties into the sea. I drove there alone, with her perfect weight next to me in the passenger’s seat. I talked to her and sang to her and recited poems to her. When I got there — not anywhere anyone would be — I placed her in a backpack that also contained kindling and sage and waited for night. The wind was unusually still, and the surf had the rise and fall of breathing. The moon’s giant eye looked on. It was the end of an Indian summer. I removed my clothes. I held her body to mine for a long time. Until it came, the great flood. Animal sounds came from my throat. Nearly all of the night we rocked that way.

When a dead calm came over me, I made a pyre of sticks and sage and the only thing I had to give to her, my hair. All of it I could sever. Great clumps of American blond. I placed her body and my hair atop the pyre and lit it on fire. I watched her burn. I did not cry while she burned. The smell of burning skin and ocean and sage. I did not look away. I collected the ashes in the morning and walked into the sea with them. So there was a moment when we were together in the same waters.

Then I entered a cataclysmic silence, a white vast, for nearly a year.

After grief — strange sister self — left me, I thought, stupidly, that I could live my life, and love the artists who are in it, and carry on by writing. I gathered them together for meals, for art events, for films and readings and gallery exhibits. I thought I could narrate over everything. This. . what I am still doing now. I am writing a journal of the girl. But I don’t know if I can withstand it. I hear my husband and son in the kitchen, making dinner, setting plates, and I close my eyes. My heart is beating me up.

I am an American woman writer. I am in the room I write in. The room with midnight blue walls. Dark red carpet against deep brown hardwood floors. Two windows with long off-white curtains. And books. . books everywhere — on floor-to-ceiling shelves, on the floor, on the desk, piles of literature, art, photography, philosophy. The colors of their spines and covers the colors of skin, blood, fire, water, night. A black iron lotus Buddha with a broken hand that we glued back on — me and my husband, my now-husband. A good ironic metaphor. Various feathers from birds I have come upon: eagle, heron, crow, crane, and swan. Bowls of rocks. A photo. The cat’s food bowl. Desperate talismans, the colors of blood and night and the bottom of an ocean. And the scent of someone over-saging a room because they are afraid they will make something to death.

I think things like, Be brave. Hold on to voice. It’s your only chance. Pick up the glass of scotch. Bring the amber liquid to your mouth. Drink. Large. Hold it there. Close your eyes. Move your goddamn hands before your mind makes a mess of it.

I see an image of a dead girl — an arrested image.

My breath jackknifes for a moment.

It’s the girl. I don’t know if she will kill me or save me.

Women and Children

The white is flat.

The girl does not look at her feet. She looks straight ahead, willing the shape in the distance to become the farmhouse they said it would be. The sky has smudged out the sun. Under each footstep she knows there is death: land mines and the graves of disappeared people. If she looks down it could kill her. Part of her wants to be blown to oblivion.

She is nothing but body: her legs and chest are burning, her jaw aches, her eyes swim in their little sockets. Then a farmhouse and barn emerge like ghosts before her; there is light in the window of the house. And another small forest — black-and-white-barked birch — on the other side of this place. She stops at the fence line and stares down. She sees her own breathing in white erratic gusts.

Little by little, her breathing eases. She can feel her tongue and teeth, her ears. She is at a crossroads: a child’s violent will to survive lodged in her chest where her heart should be, but an utter indifference along with it. Dusk is falling. She closes her eyes. When she opens them, she ignores the house and walks to the barn and chooses an empty horse stall next to a black mare. She finds a thick horse blanket, as worn and coarse as an animal’s skin. She buries herself in straw and the smell of goat, horse, pig, and chicken. When night comes, she is nothing more than an animal in a barn.

She doesn’t think about entering the farmhouse. For there is a woman in the house; she catches glimpses of her in the window at night. Her mind is on the eggs she sucked down raw. On the mason jars filled with root vegetables. On the milk she squirts from the goat’s teat into her mouth.

Next to the barn, she double-steps ten feet one way, then ten another, until she has walked out a square in the snow. With her broken knife she goes about clearing the snow away so that dirt and dried-up grass and thistles and weeds and rocks emerge. Then she digs. By the time the woman comes out of the house and spots her, she is all hands and concentration. She doesn’t even look up.

If the woman is thinking, Who is this girl, what is she doing, it has no effect on her digging. The girl is just fingers moving, nothing more.

The woman is stricken by the loss of her husband to a Siberian prison. Everything she sees has the same weight — next to nothingness.

She sees the girl when she gathers the eggs. She sees her when she feeds the animals. When she puts the horse in the field. When she milks the goat. She sees her each day, furiously at work on the ground. She sees her pile wood from the woodshed, cover it with kerosene, and light it on fire with matches from the barn. The two of them do nothing to care about each other. They take note of each other’s tasks and respectfully circle around them.

This happens for days.

The girl never comes to the door of the house; she never needs anything.

It goes like this. Six days, seven.

Then one day the woman is patching the roof and falls. The girl looks up for an instant, turning her small face to the falling. The woman’s body, then head, hit the frozen ground with a great thud. She is momentarily stunned. Then she opens her eyes and her body comes conscious. She has hurt her back, though not irreparably. She turns her head there on the ground and looks at the girl. For a moment, their eyes lock. Then the woman heaves herself up and goes in the house.

The next day the woman does not get out of bed.

In the dirt, the girl builds a forest surrounding the village, and begins the hard work of digging a trench for a river.

The next day, when the woman feeds the animals, she also brings the girl a jar of water, one half of a cooked cabbage, and a lump of sugar. She places it in a box just inside the barn.

Each day the girl builds more and more of the small village in the mud and snow and rocks and thistles. A small mound here for the center of things. The old church, the butcher’s, the small building where handmade paper was crafted, the store for ink and paint and pencils thick as a finger — pieces of charcoal in thin waferlike lengths or in rows like thumbs, oil paints she has dreamed of. She builds people with small bits of dead grass, twigs, little stones. Lining the streets. For trees, she uses pieces of the ends of trees. For walls, shale set upon its side. For the hills just outside the village, mounds of mud. Streets and bridges are made from pebbles and bark. For the sun, hay is wrapped and wrapped into a misshapen ball, set upon a hill, endlessly setting or rising. And for the photographer, the last person she saw before she shut out sight, a speckled stone.

By the time the girl’s eyes had risen to the fallen woman’s head on the ground, she was already lost in some other world. When their eyes met, the girl’s felt nothing. She turned back to her city of dirt and her hands caked with mud and continued her work. There is but one thing left to build and that is nearly unimaginable. Her house. Her father, a shattered starscape. Her brother, blown to bits like tinder. Her mother. . she shuts out the image.

She flashes to another image, smaller, that lives between her ear and her jaw. It is an ordinary image, routine as a baker’s truck delivering bread, or a woman carrying her great bags of groceries from the market, a dog barking as she passes, a flock of birds lifting to the sky as hands in prayer. It is ordinary because that’s how memory replayed over and over again works — each act of remembering deteriorating the original and creating a memorized copy. It is herds of soldiers, the colors of stone or wall, lifting up from stone or wall as drawings taking on life, coming into motion, marching; the mud-thudding of boots and heels. It is the gray-green uniforms moving in unity, erasing human as if human were a smudge on a perfect black-and-white page all the shades of pencils. It is the faces of men passing by in rows and rows, the flesh changed color and texture to some thick putty ball plopped atop shoulders, the eyes black. It is bodies bludgeoned and the splatter of red onto the gray-green arms onto the stones of the gray street onto the gray walls; it is the bodies going limp as a fish brought to shore thunked on the head and rendered lifeless and dropped into the pile of the day’s catch; it is the almost-eyes from behind windows or doors not there and yet witnessing, it is the light — not night and not day, an in-between, not horror or joy, something without a name or place, something without a color. It is a mother and a father and a brother fading from color to ash, or a woman in a house mad with grief, her love lost to white, or just a child stubbornly representing a city in the snow.

Two casualties of war: childless mother and a motherless child, happening near enough to steal each other’s very breath.

On the ninth day the woman takes the food straight to the girl. She squats down on the ground. The girl immediately starts to point to her creations and name them. The woman nods. They eat carrots. When the girl is finished naming, the woman points to a smooth blue-gray stone, which seems to inhabit a forest of sticks.

Vilkas, the girl says.

Wolf.

On the tenth day, the girl finishes the city and enters the widow’s house.

The Photographer

Hello. It’s me. I wouldn’t write unless it was important.

It began with insomnia. When I lived in Ocean Beach. Remember O.B.? I was sleeping on the floor of some musician’s apartment. Pitch-black, lingering smell of pot, and all the things I thought would slow down and get better if I stepped out of my photojournalist life and into this. . beautiful fantasy of a man’s life. Jesus. Look at him. He sleeps the sleep of the dead. Or of a clueless child.

I lifted the sheet up and looked at my tits and my belly and it suddenly occurred to me, This witless manboy is in trouble. I could roll over and kill him with this middle-aged body — bloated and difficult to roll, laden and slow to sink when dropped in water. Every year a woman’s body degrades. Five pounds. Ten. Fifteen. Fuck.

What was I thinking when I got with him? Do you remember? That I would mother him? Me, a smarty-pants middle-aged childless overachiever? A maternal figure? Are you laughing yet? God.

I remember walking into his bathroom that night thinking, I’d go down on a dead man for some high-powered sleeping pills. And looking in the mirror. And nearly coronarying. What is it — this thing of a woman going from the drive and whir of her thirties into the thick and slow-bodied drag of her forties. . is it just age that ages us? Or something else? I could feel the small feet of crows stomping around at the corners of my eyes. I could feel my ears growing longer, heavier, ridiculous. I could see my own nose growing for the rest of my life, changing my entire face, elongating it and drooping and dropping it as if everything about my face were becoming an enormous, bulbous fishing weight.

My head hurt. I heard a voice. The immensity of the image — larger than any systematized god or belief. Only the image, arrested, can liberate us from the lie which suggests that life tumbles forward toward some meaningful end. The arrested image is an artifact. When one stops the hegemony of life in motion, the truer fiction emerges. We are each simply an arrangement of particles of light, she said. We are none of us anything if not a glimpse of something fleeting and minuscule, weightless as air.

Photographs replace memory. Photographs replace lived experience. History.

The voice was mine.

The me that drives me to be something beyond a woman.

And I remembered who I was. And I knew I had to leave. So I grabbed my car keys and my camera bag and I walked out to my car and I left. Naked. Just like the night I left you in the desert, the only night of my life, I think, sometimes. My camera. Your body.

As I drove away between rows of ice plants on I-5, I thought, Take photos. It’s all you’ve got.

When you try to slow down and rest inside the life of a regular American woman, you fail. And you fatten up like a hog. Just leave it. There is no other life for a woman like you. So I took the assignment. And now they’re telling me I’ve won the prize of all prizes. Perfect.

Am sending you my notes. You’re the writer — please figure out how we can “do” something with them? Will send framed photo when I can. I don’t know what it means any longer.

All my love.

Notes — War Zone — Eastern Europe — Day 23

The night is cold as fuck and the color of ash and soot. . even with all this snow. Ironic: newspaper colored. The town has already been shot to shit, and the soldiers look to me like jack-booted thugs from some B-rated movie, really, ignorant killing machines with ill-fitting uniforms and contorted loyalties. Only their boots and rifles look lethal. Every corner of every building is shot away, making the little village look like pieces of itself. . ghost structures. There’s no telling rubble from real here. None of this has made the news, it’s just gone on and on for years without end, the supposed end of one war giving way to the endless micro-violences of forever. Nobody even knows where I am or what I’m doing or why. Not even me. The ground stinks of blood and shit. Domesticated animals — horses, sheep, pigs, dogs, and cats — wander around or stand like idiots in the paths and streets. There is a commotion up ahead — they want something — badly — and they are yanking people from homes like snatching tissues from a box. They want something — or someone — and they are moving as one entity of brute force against these small families. I don’t know these Baltic languages in any real sense — just bits and pieces enough to stay mobile. I’m only able to be this close because I’m dressed as a garbage man, as my interpreter and guide told me to. We’ve been given the duty of clearing corpses from the street. It’s easy to snap shots from this distance, in this grayed-out light, smoke and dirt and night’s falling covering my hands and sound being swallowed up like it is, though my guide looks angry with every shot I take. He doesn’t think it’s worth it. A photo, he says when we are in the cave of his house — what use is that against what is happening here? Do you even know where “here” is? Do you even know what our story is? How long this fight? I know why you are here. You are here to catch the soldiers committing atrocities. But only because you are American. You want to shame them, to make a big story of their brutality. Where were you when we needed you? During your so-called Cold War, with your promises of nuclear attack — your threat to obliterate them — we counted on you. After the war, we hid in the woods for years waiting for you. You offered us guns and money, and we accepted them. But you did not attack. And so we have been left to fight alone for all of these years.

Sometimes I think my guide wants to kill me. But he merely hands me bread and hot tea with something that helps me to sleep at night. The look he gives me is one of dismissal. I am nothing, or less than nothing, so it costs him little to help me or kill me.

We move closer and closer to the edge of this hulled-out village, its people overexposed and dead with fatigue. We pass through the rubble of some kind of town center building. We pass what was once some kind of café or bar, its windows as black as the eyes of a corpse. We pass something — a schoolhouse, maybe, its doors boarded up like a shut mouth. We are some ways behind them, and more or less part of the detritus. Soon they are at a house that is barely in the village at all. We are able to approach mostly because of our giant, horse-drawn wagon, full of rotting bodies — it seems part of the mise-en-scène.

What I see next doesn’t seem possible, but the first form to emerge from the house is a girl. She looks to be about ten or so. Her hair spreads in waves of nested coils around her face, down her shoulders. Unbelievably, she walks straight toward them. She is wearing the clothes of a boy — and soon a second self, her brother, and her father and mother, come rushing out like blood after her. There is some yelling back and forth, and then it happens — a blast from I don’t know where disintegrates the father, mother, and brother just at the edge of the girl’s body, missing her in some terrifying accident of a fraction. They blow up right before her eyes, her hair lifting for a moment, so that she looks as if she may float skyward, her arms up and out, her face glowing so white that her eyes look like blue-steel bullets, her mouth open in the shape of an O.

I remember how the ground shook.

I remember the camera going off. Shooting before I fell.

I remember her hands — palms white — fingers spread.

The light from the explosion must have acted. . like a flash. A perfect flash.

There is yelling and a lot of smoke. Not all the soldiers are there any longer. No one even looks at us as we hobble away, fear bringing bile into my mouth, my guide so angry he nearly fractures my arm pulling me away, and when I turn my head back to the action, I think I see a girl running toward the woods.

The girl — she disappears. She fucking fades to black, and in our rush and fear all we try is to stay alive, to make it out of that scene without more bloodshed. Back at my guide’s claustrophobic home, after my body quits shivering and my heart stops fuck-whacking and my lungs act like air sacks again — I mean, JESUS, how much closer can one be to an explosion and not be inside it — instead of thinking about what I just witnessed, I am seized by a random memory. It’s you. It’s the photos I shot of you the one week we were lovers. A random flashback like a bulb exploding.

Your skin. The mound of your sex. How you were right when you said I’d leave, how I was mad at you, and all I could see even while I tried to kill your quiet with my tongue was the image of your face against my leaving — against the image of me, a naked woman getting into a car and flooring it at dusk, leaving a dust swirl and tracks like an open wound with no hope of suture — doing anything she can to get the fuck out of the story. The image of your mouth. My leaving.

And then I feel some kind of back of the head WHOP and you are gone, your image, and I’m in this war zone again, and a random family comes tumbling through the door. The only word for their fear is their faces. Bread and hot beef broth appear. We all sit there in the silence of our traumas and eat. So bread and broth can save your life. And memory has no syntax.

For a long time, no one says much of anything. The mother hums to her children — two boys and a very young girl. The father stands in front of the fire with the look of a father. He and my guide share cigarettes with god knows what rolled up in them. Finally I walk over and they let me share — thank fucking baby jesus there is something LARGE and hallucinogenic in the cigarettes. Things get swirly like smoke and my skin stops revolting against me.

The mother keeps looking at me like I want to eat her children but she doesn’t stop me. The only one who will talk to me is the oldest boy. Most of what he says is a runaway train. I can only understand him in bits. First I try to take notes, but then I give up. What the fuck am I writing down? I can barely understand him. His life is ten of mine. He is maybe twelve. Fuck.

What I am able to understand is this: this family is going into the woods. The father is a schoolteacher and the mother is afraid to live in her own house, having just watched her beloved neighbors disintegrate. I ask him, Won’t they simply chase you into the woods? “No,” he says, and he is vehement with it. I think he tells me, The rebels are in the woods. They have camps. They will not chase us there. I think he tells me, If they chase us they will be cut into pieces and fed to the wolves, and we will watch, and we will laugh and sing and dance and spit on their souls by firelight.

I begin to cry. The mother puts her hand on my arm but doesn’t look at me. In this house, in this village no one in America knows the name of, in this war no one in America gives a flying fuck about, I am at home. I want to stay. Inside the danger, in front of a fire in a tiny space with people I can barely understand. This is the quick of history. This is a reason to be alive, inside the fear of being dead every second. I look at each of them one at a time. They have no love or care for me. But each of them meets my gaze. When I bring my camera out between my hands, small and without drama, they let me.

It is enough.

I don’t want any part of my former life. I want whatever is inside this small mechanical box to kill whoever I ever was. These words, the only trace left of me— I give them to you.

The Photograph

The photo of the girl is nascent.

At the moment of the blast, light through the lens hit the film like a fist of electricity. Silver halides swam frantically in their chaos, unstable as history waiting for someone to point a finger and give a name to it. In the calm thereafter, the image was invisible, latent, hidden on a roll of black-and-white Kodak film inside a Mamiya camera.

She, alone among her peers, has resisted other ways of capturing images. Even when it meant bidding for film and cameras in foreign countries.

At night, in a house, in a lull between villages and violences, that roll of film — the only one she cares about — is removed from the camera, shoved quickly inside a condom, and crammed into the photographer’s sports bra. There it sits all night, inside a prophylactic against flesh and moisture and dirt, against the ever-twitching chest of the photographer, who monkey-paws it now and again until sunrise.

The next day, this roll and several others are handed over to a journalist who is making for a bigger city with better phones and digital processing and fax machines and, thankfully, bars. Lots of bars. The roll of film in the condom jostles around with its siblings in an oblong athletic bag with a great white swoosh sewn on the side. Inside the bag it is dark and smells of chemicals, paper, sweat, and coffee. The journalist drives the Saab with one hand and scratches a scab on his driving hand with the other. The scab chips off the flesh—success—and a blood mouth the size of a peanut opens on his hand. He sucks it. He hopes he has the number of the woman he wants to bed tonight. He pictures it in his wallet between dollars. He tries to remember if she has a television.

When the car stops in a city, many hours later, the journalist dumps the bag of mismatched and varied media onto the desk of a foreign correspondent. With hands like Michelangelo, the correspondent organizes the media for their various journeys. His eyes ache. When he exhales there is a kind of moan. He’s getting too old for this. They’re giving him less and less face time and more and more makeup. His hangover sits with pickled wrath somewhere between his gut and his throat. He rubs his temples — ice picks to the brain. He stares at the roll of film. Who still processes film? What kind of prima donna is she? His hands carry the strain of his life in their tremors as he packages the film roll, lumbers onto a moped, and transports it to the last processor around.

A great white processing machine eats the film. In a space as dark as death, the film slides into its emulsions. The silver halides reduce; the first trace of the girl’s image makes its shadow self. Then the film is fixed and washed and dried, all inside the belly of the machine. A worker supervises the mass production of image after image, but the day the girl’s image emerges out of the mouth of the machine the worker is eating a sandwich and absentmindedly stroking himself in the back room and misses it. Thinking mostly about his semi-boner and wishing he had another sandwich or ten, he packs it up with the negatives after his break and shoves it all into a prepaid FedEx envelope.

The FedEx guy on the sending end is on speed. His eyes are darts.

The FedEx dude on the receiving end is stoned. He chuckles a little stoner laugh as he heads out in his magical white truck.

In America, the editorial assistant in charge of going through the daily photo deliveries every four hours moves a pile of black-and-white photos around on a desk, and the picture of the girl emerges. The editorial assistant pulls her hand back. The girl is farther in the foreground than she should be. It is because she has been blown forward, away from the explosion and toward the camera. She looks as if she is coming out of fire, her eyes bullets headed for the lens. Behind her, fire and smoke, and an arm and hand reaching out. At first, the editorial assistant doesn’t want to touch the photo. She notices that she’s holding her breath. Then she snaps out of it and carries it quickly to the editors. It feels weirdly hot in her hands. She thinks she maybe feels the warmth of blood between her legs. On the desk of the editors, the photo glows with potential. Men eye it and analyze it and judge its merits relative to other pictures. The curation happens quickly, however. There is only one image that matters.

All of this happens without the photographer. The photo, after all, is out of her hands. Later, it will be professionally and lovingly developed again — this time by hand, not machine.

Calling from a crackling phone in some hole-in-the-wall, she does give the editorial assistant one direction: Make sure the writer gets a copy of the photo. Send it right away. Write “this is the girl” on a scrap piece of paper. Then she hangs up, smiling, thinking of the writer. Hoping for her intimacy.

And so, the first time the girl comes to the house, the writer is at work on her novel.

She takes the package into her living room.

She pulls the cardboard strip that slits the belly of the package open.

Briefly she pictures the photographer’s hands.

She reaches inside and pulls the framed photo out.

It is wrapped in brown paper.

Scrawled across the front of the paper in some stranger’s hand: This is the girl.

A whisper of star-cluster emotions move briefly through her heart. She stares at the handwriting.

She unwraps the photo.

She looks.

Her pupils dilate, as they do in the dark, or when we shift focus from something far to something near, or when we are very much attracted to something, or when we enter an altered state.

Yes. This is the girl.

The Hands of a Boy

Once, when her husband was out of town at a film festival where his work was appearing, the writer took their son on a photo shoot. She bought two Kodak Instamatic cameras. She drove to the edge of the big river running through their city. It was a gray day — the kind of gray sky where the clouds look like they are holding the rain in their arms. They ran alongside the river along the river rocks, brushed their bodies inside patches of river reeds, examined a dead seagull drawn inland, collected little shells and stones. She showed him how to use the Kodak camera. His hands more adept at making things than he had language for. His cheeks two blooms.

They took photos for hours.

When she had the film developed, she took joy in his images — barely focused close-ups of rocks and sand and detritus. Odd-angled images of water and broken glass. The big gray of the sky that day. The eye of the dead seagull. And then she saw an image of herself that he’d taken. Her blond hair blowing across her face, her too-red winter wool coat, her arms so outstretched for him that they look as if they are about to pull off and away. It may be the truest image of herself she’s ever seen.

She makes a promise to herself: Remember to let go. When the time comes. Remember that you must.