Jaundiced Caitlin LeBrun
The light in the kitchen is terrible. It’s awful, I’ve never liked the way it jaundices the hell out of what should be golden laughs, bleaching the wine stains out of spilled-over happy nights. But we don’t learn and we still take the pictures there most times. And my favorite one, God, the best, isn’t just one picture, it’s a lot and they roll together much like a flip book or a time machine or a video that plays the three seconds on repeat if I let it. And it’s right there in the kitchen, through the doorway I’m looking at now, the room glowing with the sick-liver tint of a late winter sun. Someone tries to shove pizza in the frame and you can hear their happiness slopping over in the background, just dripping like a runny sprinkler, and they laugh and we laugh and the light casts yellow shadows over this gorgeous scene of five kids at three a.m. before they forget to turn the oven off. And I will tell you, I will honest to God tell you, it’s not the expiration date on the smile I’m wearing that makes me feel sad, because I will honest to God tell you I don’t know if I’m sad, I don’t know what to call that feeling that is building, stick by stick, short film by time machine by fucking photograph…building a nest somewhere close to all that thumping in my chest. My shoulders will shrug and my head will shake because neither knows either, and that’s all folks, that’s all that’s all because here I lose the audience but, hear, I don’t care, and what I know is that the way the shadows and the light from that sickly little bulb shine on the lower left corner is, for once, just enough. Enough for three seconds. Where one hand twists and the other hand shifts to meet it and the hands join and the first one squeezes, and I swear you can close your eyes and just almost feel it and it plays on repeat. That moment is much louder than everything, anywhere else.
reflection. 14