Carnation
By Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi
Slide 1: Jackie and Alice stand at the window. The curtains are drawn to prevent silhouetting. This is the only photograph in which they pose together. (Camera person, relative? friend?)
I’ve been given conflicting estimates of the age of these negatives, but they’re from the first ten years that San Francisco was a city. Once the veins of gold were struck, there flooded down whites and Chinese in the thousands, pitching tents in the dunes of sand and naming streets where there had been only wind. And here are Jackie and Alice, as I’ve named them, holding hands in that first gasp as though life depended on the potency with which they loved. Maybe it did.
Slide 2: Here is Alice sitting at a table, maybe a desk. She is a beautiful woman, in a different sense of the word from any which I’ve previously conceived. She has the emaciated look of the nineteenth century, or of its surviving photographs: 1906 alone should have devoured them. San Francisco had been poised to be the capital of the West. The earthquake lasted forty seconds, but the fires it started—and, even worse, the fires that the Army started in an attempt to barricade the initial fires…in the end, there was hardly a city left. Trade was diverted south to Los Angeles.
Were Jackie and Alice still here in 1906? Were they one of the undocumented hundreds who burned alive? If these photos survived, there is hope that they made it, too.
Slide 3: This is my favorite. Alice is genuflecting in an enormous dress that takes up the room. Although the image is a monochrome sepia, its shape and patterns suggest all sorts of colors. It is like staring into the center of a carnation. After a while, you can actually smell it.
Slide 4: A close-up of Alice’s eyes. It has an effect very similar to Slide 3. It’s unreal, looking long and deeply into hundred-and-fifty-year-old eyes. Young hundred-and-fifty-year-old eyes.
What were their real names? What did they do for a living? Did they have children? Do they have descendants? I walked up and down Grant Street today, looking for Jackie and Alice in the faces of the shopkeepers, the grocers, the smokers…. Talking to them was as impossible as talking to Jackie and Alice. The past is a different language. Is it a language you can learn? Does one forget a word of the future for every word one learns of the past?
Slides 5 through 42 are inchoate, abstract. They’ve faded completely to white or leave to posterity only the curve of an arm, the flutter of hair, a suggestion of sun and shadow. We can never get closer than this. I have four images of their world, and thirty-eight more that only frustrate. They are corpses, vessels that once breathed and felt; memento mori at best. Yet it’s in these thirty-eight that Jackie and Alice still live. It’s in these thirty-eight negatives that anything, everything happens.
THE END
Author Bio: Gabriel da Silva-Schicchi is a Brazilian-American writer based in Seattle, with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His fiction has been published in Epoch, Epiphany, Arcturus, and elsewhere.