jennie raze i don't remember you. you were gone before my eyes started taking pictures that were vibrant enough to stay with me. i wish i'd been born earlier. i wish you'd lived longer. i wish i could feel you with me. you were a storm_walker. you were a seamstress. you were an artist. you didn't know your own worth. i have pictures of you, but they're pictures i didn't take. you're standing outside of a gas station, elegant in black_and_white, a knowing smirk on your face, the wind in your hair. you're holding my father in your arms, dancing with him in your kitchen, the same way he'll dance with me thirty years later when i can't fall asleep in my crib. you're at his wedding, wearing a dress you made. you're in florida, laughing, too thin, too little of you left, half your stomach gone. you're sitting on your mother's couch, wearing a pink silk blouse and a long red skirt. you're holding me in your lap, smiling at me, saying something the camera can't hear. something i can't hold onto. i have other pictures. pictures no one took. pictures that have been burned into someone else's mind. you're throwing a glass of water in your husband's face to get him out of bed. he's supposed to be running his father's business. he'd rather sleep all day. he'd rather let the business fail, let a legacy crumble, and live off his inheritance when his father dies, stretching his own death out for decades. body and soul gone to seed. so many years of nothing. when he does leave the house, he comes home to tell you about the other women he's sleeping with. he describes every curve of their perfect bodies. you start spending time with the woman who lives next door. her husband cheats on her too, but he doesn't talk about it. you play cards. she drinks. you drink. after your divorce, you marry a drinker. a man with a crewcut, an angry face, and an ugly heart. you move to another city. when my father is a teenager he tells you he's leaving. he's going home. you leave with him. after a year, you ask him if he's okay with you going back. you would stay if he said no. he says yes. you make dresses for friends and family. clothes more beautiful than anything they could buy in any store. sometimes you have to guess at the sizes. you're never wrong. you work at a bakery. you give free food to the people who can't afford to eat. your second husband dies of an asthma attack on april_fools day. my father thinks it's a joke when his brother tells him over the phone. it's not a joke. you move in with your mother. you live in the house her husband built for her sixty years ago. you keep drinking. she finds some of your hiding spots, but not all of them. one of your tricks is to keep a bottle inside the toilet tank. you cut beer with whiskey hoping she won't know. she knows. you die in your bed on my second birthday. a perforated ulcer pumps poison through your body and takes you away from everyone. your mother holds your hand until it's over. at your funeral, a carnation falls from a wreath of flowers and lands in the casket. right between your folded hands. like someone put it there. that night, my mother and father are sitting in the living room of their house. they hear footsteps heading upstairs. the sound stops at my bedroom. there's nothing for a while. then there are footsteps again, moving back the way they came, and you're gone. 210907 ... kerry i love this. i feel like i'm looking through a pile of snapshots while you tell me about them. and maybe it's just me but we can never have enough letters_to_the_dead. 210907 ... raze that means a lot coming from you, kerry. i love everything you write. what you wrote on hunger_pangs yesterday was really powerful, packing so much into just a few paragraphs. and i'm with you when it comes to writing letters_to_the_dead. i think it's almost a kind of invocation. a way of keeping people alive in us even if they aren't here anymore. 210907 ... tender square this is gorgeous, j. i love stories about family lineage so much. thank you for sharing this today. 210907 ... raze (thank you for all the beautiful things you're sharing too.) 210907 what's it to you? who go blather from