We were in a round room with the lights off, very quietly. Crumbs of snow fell like dry dirt from the shallow sky, gray like a dandelion in the gray wind. S with the ends of their red hair was hovering over sleep in the shallow bed and I sat beside them, reading or thinking about reading or thinking about my folded parts while nesting my eyes in the concave of the worded pages. Beside me dandelion tea. The cold was enough in us and so we had returned from it, wordless and pink like newborn babies, except I was a slug and S was a deer or the fox we had seen. It was a two fox week. We had seen also the skulls of two birds and S chose one very carefully, rinsing it in the sly part of the creek that was still moving, still and moving its icy snake down like the newborn baby of a cascade or current.
“Do you ever want to be breastfeeding?” S asked me, less pink and awake now, waking me from my aloneness. Their left hand held their right elbow in a cradle. They rocked the very quiet air under their chest in a nourished hush.
No was my answer, then yes. I never knew what I wanted. This was how we got the idea that it was a good time to take the pictures: the light had concluded its faraway ritual and came to drip through the top of the one window in the bedroom. S got the camera, a small alien with an eye for a body, distant and benevolent. I stood by the closet, my shoulder against its knocking door while they fiddled or fuddled it. Their focus grew round, oblong, then spherical in their hands. I liked to watch them work. In their two hands the work seemed like glue, sometimes like the tiniest parts of the car. Soon we were bringing things in and I tried to mold my corners into a helpful shape, though they remained corners and jutted out of me, a stalactite. I carried the pillows from the couch. There was a missing button. By the time we had it there was a tower. From bottom to top the tower went like this:
a chair, rooster pattern sewed into the seat,
couch cushion
couch cushion
pillow from the bed, floral
pillow from the bed, yellow
purple spiral notebook
The Collected Works of Lucille Clifton
The camera was the window out of which the prince in the tower blinked, it was the balcony on which we took our midnight smoke, and the tower had a moat of light around it. We were ready. I stood by the closet and looked at the wall, the corner where the walls met. S clicked ‘GO’ and we were going, the orange light blinking like a lighthouse or a spark from the rubbed wings of moths. I was looking at the corner, the place that traps inside the inside air, it looked like paper glued together but it was the front of our house. But in the photo it looks like I am my reflection, striped down the middle and a little soft, even in my folds. Especially in my folds. I wore my glasses. S is next to me in the square of the wooden frame, the frame of the mirror a square within the square of the white wall of the blink of the photo, and the closet makes a corner with the top of my head. S is next to me. Their silver necklace a way in. Under the frame our fingers are touching, you cannot see, and this is like kissing, like pulling a rope taut, smothered honey, the camera’s click, the sky going from gray to gray and light.
The next morning we said goodbye.