Cursed Bread

by Sophie Mackintosh

now I think of myself as biographer, archivist, witness, doing the important work. Who else will remember? Who else will make it good, make it beautiful, make sense of it all? There were never any marks left.

She had realized that the barrier between one world and the next was not really a barrier at all, at best a sheet of silk, able to flicker and let the light through.

I might be afraid of being forgotten, but at the same time I do not want to leave any proof behind. I live lightly in my little room.

It’s hard to tell what an image will come to mean, what a person will mean, when you are still seeing it for the first time, and some things you always see as if for the first time.

I have lost so many hours, days even, to remembering these moments that I never lived.

Perhaps the years should have preserved me like a thing in a museum, but bodies don’t work like that; if a body isn’t touched it falters faster, the yearning is visible at the surface, much as you might try to hide it.