Читать книгу Quick Kills - Lynn Lurie - Страница 12

In the photographs he takes that afternoon, I am naked in an abandoned swimming pool. Rainwater has collected at the deep end and last year’s dead leaves float across the surface. The trees aren’t yet bare, their leaves having only begun to turn color. He has me stand ankle deep in the water before ordering me onto my back.

I make a face.

In the dry part then. He points to the far corner. Lie down and spread your hair above your head, like a halo.

Our first excursion was to the Bronx Zoo. The Photographer wanted to shoot me holding a python. The snakemaster wrapped the thickest, blackest one around my shoulders. An employee of the zoo offered to take a picture of the python and me with the Photographer, referring to me as the Photographer’s daughter. At that moment the snake picked up its head and began to slither towards my face. I did not scream. I pleaded with the snakemaster to take the python off me.

After the snake was in its tank, I washed my hands with a special soap. One wash was not enough. He let me wash as many times as I wanted, until he said it was possible the soap could burn a hole in my skin.

There is fear in my eyes. I see the fear clearly even in the blurred snapshot. The adults waiting in line with their children must have seen it too. Fear like I have seen in my sister’s eyes when she stood outside the kitchen door, craning her neck inside. Her back arched, she was prepared to turn away if Father was still seated in front of his orange juice and toast. When she saw that his spot was empty, that his juice glass had been drained, her eyes lost their intensity. It is the same fear the artist captured in the painting he made of my sister, myself, and my brother that hangs above the love seat in our parents’ house, although he didn’t put the fear into my sister’s eyes, but into mine.

Years later when I visualize my death it is in the same woods where the swarm rose from the ground. My clothes are on and I am wearing my winter coat. Once settled into a tiny pit I have dug with my hands, I cover myself with fallen leaves and swallow the pills I have been stealing from my sister and Mother and hoarding ever since I first went to the Photographer’s house.