Photographs
Shira Dentz

It was important to see him without them. The big cupcake that school gave out
on birthdays that he saved an entire afternoon to share with her; the Abraham
Lincoln book he brought home from the hospital library; the name of a girl,
Candy, he met there. A charcoal blue wool hat, the matching scarf with small
snowflakes sewn onto his snowsuit, the dresser drawers that were his. The
carnival horses wallpapering their room: how she’d hold the lines of their
contours in her eyes, then, as if they were pick-up sticks, let them scatter;
however they’d land she’d see, at the very least, one brand new figure. She made
believe it was deliberate, that she was the artist who’d drawn the figure, and look
away determined to see it on the wall again; each and every time she’d lose its
whereabouts. Their yelping at pigeons in the tunnel they passed through on their
way to the supermarket; their voices came back two, three times, in different
shades, and the black, plump birds would move a little. But not the sound of his
voice nor his way of talking; not his laugh either. The shape of his nails were
different from hers; she reconciled their difference by deciding his were boy’s.
She didn’t care for his thumb—it was particularly wide. She tried to find
something good about his thumb. Shapes on people’s bodies told things. Their
width like the width of a smile. Must have been something very fine about his
smiling, especially with his lids purple-black, their sheen like that of worn cloth;
in a very short time, too short to notice beginning, his head got bigger, his five-
year-old face pocked with teenage acne; a midget man-boy. The Florida t-shirt
our grandmother brought back for him was extra-large. He became more and
more distant—shapes on him changing and re-arranging.