The Small Backs of Children Read Online Free PDF

foreign countries.
    At night, in a house, in a lull between villages and violences, that roll of film—the only one she cares about—is removed from the camera, shoved quickly inside a condom, and crammed into the photographer’s sports bra. There it sits all night, inside a prophylactic against flesh and moisture and dirt, against the ever-twitching chest of the photographer, who monkey-paws it now and again until sunrise.
    The next day, this roll and several others are handed over to a journalist who is making for a bigger city with better phones and digital processing and fax machines and, thankfully, bars. Lots of bars. The roll of film in the condom jostles around with its siblings in an oblong athletic bag with a great white swoosh sewn on the side. Inside the bag it is dark and smells of chemicals, paper, sweat, and coffee. The journalist drives the Saab with one hand and scratches a scab on his driving hand with the other. The scab chips off the flesh— success —and a blood mouth the size of a peanut opens on his hand. He sucks it. He hopes he has the number of the woman he wants to bed tonight. He pictures it in his wallet between dollars. He tries to remember if she has a television.
    When the car stops in a city, many hours later, the journalist dumps the bag of mismatched and varied media onto the desk of a foreign correspondent. With hands like Michelangelo, the correspondent organizes the media for their various journeys. His eyes ache. When he exhales there is a kind of moan. He’s getting too old for this. They’re giving him less and less face time and more and more makeup. His hangover sits with pickled wrath somewhere between his gut and his throat. He rubs his temples—ice picks to the brain. He stares at the roll of film. Who still processes film? What kind of prima donna is she? His hands carry the strain of his life in their tremors as he packages the film roll, lumbers onto a moped, and transports it to the last processor around.
    A great white processing machine eats the film. In a space as dark as death, the film slides into its emulsions. The silver halidesreduce; the first trace of the girl’s image makes its shadow self. Then the film is fixed and washed and dried, all inside the belly of the machine. A worker supervises the mass production of image after image, but the day the girl’s image emerges out of the mouth of the machine the worker is eating a sandwich and absentmindedly stroking himself in the back room and misses it. Thinking mostly about his semi-boner and wishing he had another sandwich or ten, he packs it up with the negatives after his break and shoves it all into a prepaid FedEx envelope.
    The FedEx guy on the sending end is on speed. His eyes are darts.
    The FedEx dude on the receiving end is stoned. He chuckles a little stoner laugh as he heads out in his magical white truck.
    In America, the editorial assistant in charge of going through the daily photo deliveries every four hours moves a pile of black-and-white photos around on a desk, and the picture of the girl emerges. The editorial assistant pulls her hand back. The girl is farther in the foreground than she should be. It is because she has been blown forward, away from the explosion and toward the camera. She looks as if she is coming out of fire, her eyes bullets headed for the lens. Behind her, fire and smoke, and an arm and hand reaching out. At first, the editorial assistant doesn’t want to touch the photo. She notices that she’s holding her breath. Then she snaps out of it and carries it quickly to the editors. It feels weirdly hot in her hands. She thinks she maybe feels the warmth of blood between her legs. On the desk of the editors, the photo glows with potential. Men eye it and analyze it and judge its merits relative to other pictures. Thecuration happens quickly, however. There is only one image that matters.
    All of this happens without the photographer. The photo, after all, is out of her