Shooting My Sister By the Inner Harbor
by Reilly Cox
after Saeed Jones
• When my sister cries, she takes photographs of herself.
• That is when I feel most beautiful, she says, sipping her coffee.
• My sister also finds beautiful: collapsing row houses; shirts with stars on them; and vitiligo.
• Vitiligo being a condition concerning the pigments in skin.
• Setting down her coffee, my sister stretches her hands and imagines her skin rippling with color.
• Colors of my sister: brown (her eyes); galaxy (her shirt); polluted sunset (her hair).
• Two people with blue eyes cannot have a brown-eyed child.
• Blue eyes being a recessive gene.
• This is one of two statements made by my father’s mother to my mother.
• The other being, If Robert ever lays a hand on you, you can stay with us.
• My sister makes her living making coffee for strangers.
• Often, she will absorb so much caffeine through her skin that she will shake.
• I asked Poppy about it, she tells me.
• Poppy referring to my father’s father.
• ‘Well of course you’re not one of us- look at you,’ Poppy said.
• He referring to her brown eyes and thick hair.
• Watching ducks shit, we sip our coffee on a bench and wait for our brother to join us.
• He having been indisposed with women.
• This being a result of how his eyes will shift from blue to green with springtime.
• So, don’t tell mom, but I contacted José, my sister starts.
• Bio dad, she offers to my confusion.
• I’m going to call him later, she says. After my shift.
• That night, my sister calls up José and hears for the first time in her life her father’s voice.
• His wife and two children asleep, he speaks softer than Havana the morning after independence.
• Your mother and I went back to the hotel and we made love, he begins, and my sister becomes a forced voyeur to the start of her life.
• The next morning, I had asked her to come with me to New York, he says
• To start a life.
• José says, In Tucson, on the mountain, she kneeled amongst the agave and mallow, and I shot her like that.
• When I developed the photograph, the land looked as if it were on fire.
• Professional grade film comes on rolls of thirty six shots, which leaves thirty five other photographs from that night, that morning.
• For instance: my mother covering her face with her hands.
• On the phone, José hangs up, and my sister feels cacti blooming in her belly.
• She cries, trying to flood a desert.
• She shoots herself like that.
• In Baltimore, in the darkroom, my sister lets her face swim in solution until she is nothing but light.