Is It Better to be Bitten by Teeth of Wood or Bone?
Really Just Contemplating a Five Year Old Photograph
The forced intimacy of a small bathroom can be welcome to two people abandoned behind society’s walls. I wish I could say this is the love story of a valley girl and a demon. The story of settling into the routine of domesticity. He’d leave his cereal bowl in the living room and she’d pee with the door open. A story punctuated by those relaxed moments of getting ready together for an evening spent with friends. A ghouls’ night out one could say, if one were into puns that are give aways. Is that even a pun or is it more word play? She applied red to her pale lips, to fit into Culture’s idea of Woman, and he applied white to cover his hellscape face.
But this isn’t fiction because I’m horrible at fiction writing. Or rather, writing fiction feels like eating with wooden teeth. I’d say “ask George Washington,” but he never wore wooden dentures. His deceitful teeth were formed of a variety of materials, from gold and lead to ivory and the teeth of other people. Chewing with teeth meticulously carved of wood wouldn’t feel real - there’d be a malleability to them that we don’t have with bone; that to me is fiction writing - the false feel of the unreal. I will read fiction tho, as curiously as I will tongue the remnants of that tree that grows from your gums.
I took this photo on the night of Doug’s first annual haunted house, five years ago this month. The house was full of wails and laughter as we all ate and readied ourselves for the night, but Megan and Jim were studiously silent in their makeup application. Two of the quietest people I know, yet two of the most talkative too, depending on situation and context. Tho maybe that is true of all quiet people, they each have a chatty side, just like all us talkers each have a soundless side.
The constricted space of the tiny bathroom squeezed them into shared alignment. Megan’s bloody slip emerging from the Attack the Block blackness of Jim’s cloak, a Yin and Yang trunk split in two. Reflecting each other’s unseen movements, or maybe this was the only moment they were in sync and I happened to stumble across it.
The bathroom in this photo has been completely remodeled into a soothing showpiece of tile, wainscoting, and stylish fixtures. This photo wouldn’t be as interesting to me if it was taken in that bathroom now. It’s the outdated, rental-level design of the bathroom as it used to be that supports this photo. While people are prominent in my photography, my eye is keen to the background - that atmospheric framework built for purposes other than serving to tether the subjects to the frame. Bottles of soap and lotion, and a Steve Zissou shower curtain identified only by a hand in the mirror, this is where the excitement begins. Just one excised moment of skin sliced out of Time’s limbs.
On writing fiction and it feeling weird: I used to feel the same. But after a while you realise there’s a truth you can hide in fiction that’s harder to hide in non-fiction.
There’s an interesting play and statement you can make in fiction that is much harder to make when you’re being ‘obvious’.
Agree with Oleg about that closing line, small but you feel it, nothing soft about a slice however small.