She didn’t understand his relationship to things. She didn’t understand his relationship to his things. They were a mystery to her, not just in terms of his attraction to them, but in terms of what they in fact were. Some looked like clothes but had no holes for arms or heads. Some looked like books but she couldn’t read the titles. There was a picture of a crying girl who had her face from when she was a girl but could not have been her as it was painted a century before her birth. There were miniatures of buildings that existed in no place, fabric samples, wires. “You have to get rid of these things,” she told him. “They’re killing you.” He looked up from a deck of cards he was shuffling that had images of insects attacking dogs with the heads of cats. Did he see her? She was wearing a dress that he had once called “criminal,” holding a picture of the two of them on their honeymoon. “They’re killing us,” she said. But what she really meant was her.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
No comments:
Post a Comment