Inventory
August 1st
Things I saw today:
A sunset so pink it reminded me of what Koko said. We were standing by the glass door of the balcony, staring out into sky and concrete; the city was quiet now. “Winter sunsets must be different,” she mused. Which is to say, to live, one must remember the seasons.
A little girl, maybe four or five. Her hand was in her father’s, ambling down a street in a collared pink dress too large for her small shoulders and too long at the knees—all the more fitting for an innocence still hers, I told myself.
An opened packet of bread sitting atop a culvert. The woman who looked at it curiously, her attention to the strange scene attracting my own. Pristine, uneaten. As if whoever unwrapped it would be right back, or had left too suddenly to take it with them. I thought it a curse waiting to be unleashed, the lure of a hungry god meeting a hungrier mouth.
What are we willing to barter in order to be sated? What comforts do we permit in exchange of ourselves?
Writing in ‘Things They Lost’, Okwiri Oduor says that wraiths—djinns, spirits—know the thing one wants the most. How a body, when it is known to oneself, has nowhere to hide its desire.
