Wild Fires by Sophie Jai

Author:Sophie Jai [Jai, Sophie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-02-16T12:00:00+00:00

17

Oh, but Junior’s face was both heaven and hell! For in the infant’s refinement, beneath the layers of baby fat as he grew into a spindly toddler, lay latent the spitting image of Blues.

On Florence Street, there is a photograph sitting on the living room’s mantel of the little boy I never knew, smiling, as dead children do in pictures. In it, Junior is five years old. He is whooshing down a slide, both arms raised above his head, and squealing in an almost audible delight. My Auntie Tippie is crouching at the end of the metal tongue, waiting to receive the full thrust of her youngest. If there were ever a picture to be framed, slotted into a documentary, and moved slowly across the screen as an ominous narrator told the true account of their tragic deaths, this would be the one.

We do have photo albums. My parents had brought with them from Trinidad hundreds and hundreds of pictures, and at one point, when they moved to Toronto, had decided to organize the people of their lives, including themselves, into chronological order. But when Briony and I went through the albums, often in search of our younger selves, we found that each one, though started, was never actually finished. We found pictures laid under thin, sticky films at the beginning and middle, but in the last quarter, nothing – not even the films of the pages had been peeled back. There existed seven or eight albums curated like this with no logic to their endings; the last picture of one album is of icicles, zoomed in, hanging off a tree, and in another, three smiling faces blur into the background with a closeup of a startled and unidentified iris.

Briony and I used to make a game of it, reaching our arms elbow-deep into the box, churning the pictures around, saying that whoever we pulled out we’d have to live with for the rest of our lives. Once, I pulled out a picture of young Auntie Moira, and Briony had screamed, “Oh my God! No! Never!”, and when she pulled out a picture of Auntie Rani, we just looked at each other and shrugged. If we didn’t know who was in the picture and it was of a male, we took the risk that he was not related to us and said, “Your boyfriend.” Another time she pulled out a picture of our father, and both of us – I had seen it in her face, too – had to try very hard not to cry.

Unless we were lucky to find the date was scribbled on the back of a picture, we never knew when a photo was taken, and most times, not even who was in the picture. Briony and I often mistook ourselves for the other, especially when we were babies and nothing but blobs and drool. We would fight and ask our mother. She would barely need to look at the photo before saying who it was, with the evidence of a story to back it up.

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