Sunday

In some old black and whites, leaves turn a yard into an ocean. There was no beret for the photographer that day because it was fixed atop the snowman. I had found one of her pearls under the couch and a needle in one of the cushions, rolled the pearl into a snowball, some cold oyster, and just kept going. The needle was another story. It entered my wrist. The day I broke the Polaroid, I took it up into the white birch, slipping on branch ice, juggling, using my ass for leverage, but I couldn’t bring myself to snap a picture. Maybe it was the needle in my wrist, or the way the world looked stark white and formless. I had wished I could have found a key under the couch, something old with a few harmless teeth. Or a foreign coin. Something exotic. Something that did not hurt.