knits and fractures
an excerpt

So right now my father looks like Frankenstein, and scared a little kid in the grocery store the other day, says my sister when she picks me up from work. A little girl. She took a look at my dad’s head and muffled a shriek into her tiny fist, then took off running, her little shoes tapping out an s.o.s. on the shiny Kroger floor. S.O.S. A man turned into a monster looked at me. Help, mom.

He has an incision going from the center of his forehead down to just in front of his ear on the right side of his head, the aneurism having been in that general area. It’s sewn up with black sutures on his forehead, and then the truly grotesque part, the shiny silver staples come after that, following in a somewhat jagged line all the way down to his ear. A railroad track. Dominoes. A miniature parking lot. What does it look like?

What does it look like?

Lines of ones, repeated. Meaningless without the zeroes to interject, fall between and around, make sense of this bizarre thing. How do we ever make sense?

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

They just look like regular staples, which sort of freaked me out. I thought that medical staples would look different somehow… you know, medical. These just look like smaller versions of the ones I used to put up all the posters and scarves and photographs when I moved and had to redecorate so my house felt lived in.

They look like the staples in my walls.

The walls are cracking in some places from the staples, but I refuse to take them out, because I need the pictures up.

I need pictures to remember things. When I don’t take them, or put them away, or lose them, I start forgetting, things start getting hazy, it all turns blurry and soft at the edges. My life gets cloudy without pictures.

I get scared I won’t remember if I don’t have them. I have pictures of bad things, too. I am afraid to throw them away, even though I don’t want to see them. I make myself look at them sometimes.

So this is where we are. This is where I am.

These are the photos that I should have taken, but didn’t. I’m forcing them back to the surface of my memory. I’m dragging them out so that I can press out the wrinkles and paste them back down. I need them back, so I’m going on tramp to find them.