Box Negative

By Tamas Dobozy

photo by Karl Griffiths on Pexel

Your locket terrified me as a child. You were an 
old lady then. It swung back and forth as you
bent, pouring tea, knocking against your
breastbone below where your dress, always red,
parted at the neck. I kept asking you to open it,
and you did, out of tiredness. Open it again,
please. Open it again. I had no actual desire to
see the photograph inside. There was nothing
special about it, not even on the thousandth
viewing. The minute you shut it, I could no longer
remember what the face looked like, and when I
closed my eyes, the face passed even further out
of range, out of memory, and there was the real
terror: as if what I couldn’t remember was not the
image but the memory of having seen it. I
watched you and the old ladies pouring tea,
patron saints of erasure, their heart-shaped
holes knocking on their bones.                                         

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