A Thing To Hide

I dug into the album drawer at 5 o’clock but by the time the meal had been consumed my hunger was bigger than all the wake tables I had imagined combined. Surrounded like the dowager herself, I wasn’t poked by the loose binder wires or laminated corners but settled in. Then I dug again, dug at the roots of my scrubs, joining animals and grubs in chaos, until my nails became rimmed with black dirt which gets rubbed into my skirt with my free hand. The other covered my face.

-

These are my family albums. At one meter down, I’m not seeing much but I taste how the capsicum had once caramelized, a memory of a pan becoming sweeter as skin sheds. I taste the single texture of gold carrots sliding across my teeth and down. I ginger beer laugh, blowing bubbles through my nose. As I turned through the pages the trash smell too becomes sweet and foul, all stagnant and stale in its nostalgia tang.

-

I don’t recognise these faces, dead or insignificant or far away. They sit fizzing in my tongue and dumpy in my cheeks. Must have been a sight to see, us watching the oven door until fat drips to the floor of the pan. That Crying Lamb made all the faces fill, crying from the smoke in their eyes, but smiling at me and cursing the chef. Hopeless fuck.

-

Those faces in the trash heap, they fill like wine glasses drained in reverse, from the stains on my couch and tips of my blued teeth, blackened lips. And suddenly I was there, before the house filled with air at the command of my cartographer’s hand across chocolate wrappers, banana peels. All this trash, all collected, all curated, all in agreeance; there’s no uncle who sat blowing bubbles into his beer at me, Christmas 2002, after he was told to stop. He’s faceless. There’s no suicide. But it’s stitched between, or it’s all I can see. Just things to hide.

2017

Note: this is a work of fiction