Red,
We look into these finger paintings through binoculars, our brother’s technique. He says old things are known when we look so close. The mold on the flower stems, your fingerprint on the vase. The colors our sister wove into the loom before leaving, her iris blues and orchid pinks.
Drinks and songs on the fire escape, we clap for the nurses. Bang pots for the purple hearts.
The warm winds take us back to May, to the farm, when the evening air was lilac and cool and we could still hold it in our chest. Summer came in a day, we saw it shift in the soil on the hillside, in the age of our flowers, suddenly.
A professor read to us from poetry books, designed new holes in the farmhouse wall for oddly shaped windows. We carved trails into the thicket together, hatchets in hand, winding paths through the forest we never found again.
Vodka and cigarettes, Red, silent nights on the porch like philosophers do. And when the harvest moon set behind the mountain, we listened to her sing in Greek.
She used to make predictions, it’s how she told stories. Like black barns burning.
Law cannot help but be armed, and its arm, par excellence, is death, she would say.
Death is what she studied, she has a PhD in it. We enjoyed her drugs and fed carrots to her dog, a black lab named Blue.
And there was this thing about her, Red, you will know exactly what we mean, this thing about her tattoos. These dark scenes from Goya paintings. Each morning they were a little different, as if they’d morphed or shifted in the night. Like she designed, in the morning’s mirror, what they were able to be.
June hangovers can be lovely, but once the professor hit the wasps’ nest with a broom. Like it was on purpose, we think, just to test us. The cloud fell over our head and the professor led us carefully to the creek. Her hand was warm but we kept falling on the rocks, the moss, this thundering pain.
Go in, she said, and we stayed underwater until the beating stopped.
It took a long time, we think. There were fish bones tumbling over stones down there, a pair of eyeglasses, the algae sway. We had weird visions of winter, like the cold rippling had changed our internal season.
When we came out our eyes were swollen, and it was snowing. The professor picked the drowned wasps from our hair, put vodka in our milk.
We watched her make an ancient shape with the firewood, like sculpture, like the kind of structure you’d recognize inside a dream and not know why.
Then, as she does, she burnt it down.
Knowledge is not for knowing, she repeated, again and again, in a whisper. Knowledge is for cutting.
We know we’re not to tell you what to do, Red, that we never could. But six hundred people died yesterday, just in this state. And those are the ones who were counted.
They are going to say to us, go back to work, please, go back to work, but we can’t listen. We can’t.
Really, Red, please. Please. Take real care.
Dyl