The shadow on the x-ray is actually almost lovely, my sister told me: a flourish on something as static as bone. I wasn’t prepared to believe her but when she took the square cardstock envelope from off her bed and turned off the lights and pressed the contents against the apartment window to push the sun right through I saw just what she meant. Like a Rorschach test on her lumbar curve. Or black coffee out of a jittery hand, or shade without a tree. Like the spiders our mother saw in the corners of her two failing eyes, spiders she called the nerve death, vertebrates just passing through. We were sort of museum-silent and looked at it and not at what it looked like, a portrait in negative space. I asked her then why she was keeping it in her bedroom. Isn’t it really quite good-looking though? She asked back.
Marnie Shure
www.xanga.com/pianomarn
Marnie Shure
www.xanga.com/pianomarn