The Small Backs of Children Read Online Free PDF Page A

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