As my fingers slide down his tattoo, I realize I’m the right direction to properly see the collage. The grid which I now recognize as the grid of streets from our neighborhood. The tree which I now see is the tree from his backyard with tiny little rungs leading up to a tiny treehouse in its branches. And the words inked in a small, typewritten font under the collage. They are in Latin, and I have enough grasp of the dead language now to know what they mean. Quid si. My heart flips over, once, inside my chest. It means: what if. I look up at him, and he looks back at me, and I can’t tell what
...more
