Before You Break by Kyla Stone

Author:Kyla Stone [Stone, Kyla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945410048
Publisher: Paper Moon Press
Published: 2017-02-15T06:00:00+00:00

28

Lena

I spend hours every day in the darkroom while Dad rests. I’ve made several good prints from the negatives of Eli and Hadley. My favorite is one of Hadley cupping a wet stone in her outstretched hands, her face alight with the thrill of discovery.

But it’s still not right. Technically, the print is perfect. The composition, the exposure, the clarity—everything is good. But I’m not satisfied. The picture is missing something, something I’m not giving it.

I groan and lean back against the sink. My legs and back ache from hours spent standing and bending. The wooden table is scattered with dozens of technically perfect prints, but I’ve rejected all of them.

The photographs for the competition must be better than perfect. They must be art. Anyone with a bit of skill could create these pictures. There’s nothing in them that speaks to me.

Mom always said art was supposed to speak. Sometimes it was beautiful or ugly or painful, but it always said something. It always had a soul.

There’s no soul in these pictures.

It’s the candid snapshots of my family I keep turning back to. My father, my mother, my sister. The negatives aren’t great. Most are over or underexposed or unfocused, the composition lopsided or cramped. And yet, they’re beautiful in their imperfection. They make my heart ache with a pain so savage I can barely breathe. They make my veins bleed, my bones splinter.

It’s a risk, using these photographs instead of the safe landscapes, portraits, or even the abstract art other students will submit. The final prints I’ve managed to cobble together create a portrait of a fractured family, a cluster of damaged, wounded people lost in the orbits of their individual pain and heartbreak.

It’s a dangerous thing to display loss so openly, without regard. It’s the only way I know how.

I push aside the images of Eli and his daughter, the photographs of the river, the house, the ones I convinced Astrid to let me take at the mechanic’s shop. Instead, I spread out the photographs that make up my past.

Beads of sweat gather at my hairline. I rub the moisture away with my forearm. I feel lighter than I have in days. Down here, in the quiet warmth and the red haze, I’m free to relive my memories, to relish some and discard others, to create my family anew, as we used to be, as we could have been.

Who might my mother have been, without her illness? An artist, a mother, a wife. Who might we all have been, without that blot in her brain?

I sift a picture out of the pile in front of me. In it, Mom looks happy. She’s seated at her easel in the living room, newspapers spread below her to catch any stray blobs of paint. Her gaze is directed at the painting, her delicate eyebrows scrunched together and her lower lip pinched between her small white teeth. Her long braid loops over the wing of her shoulder, and she grips a loaded brush in her right hand.

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