Photo Albums

the pictures went in like a splinter you can’t dig out.

one was a Jewish boy, maybe ten, lost inside a heap of striped rags, the yellow star sewn onto the chest like a shipping label on a crate. then page after page of bones twisted wrong, and black smoke rolling out of brick chimneys into a flat, empty sky.

he sat there in the half-dark living room, cigarette dangling, trying to force the images out of his head with anything else. like wild horses tearing loose across some nowhere plain, iron hooves slamming the red dirt, the thick green stink of the South African bush at night swallowing the room whole. anything to overwrite those albums his grandfather had dragged home after the war, pages stiff with other people’s endings.

but the photos just stayed, quiet and patient, teaching him a cold sort of humility—the kind that hits when you realize the world can turn a whole town into smoke while everyone else just finishes their beer.

war correspondent,
battle of El Alamein,
on to Treblinka.