story in progress

On the day we found the Polaroid we were either the closest of friends (like fingernails and flesh as the Spaniards say) or we didn’t have a word for each other. Maybe we were fighting even. It very rarely goes any other way in beginning for Irish twins. Maybe it never goes any other way, since pleasantries very rarely learn to become pleasant.
The field was about 60 percent longer than our elementary school required. Like a lover that’s not big of belly, but wide of torso, and can be embraced but not quite snapped up in a body gobble. Once our P.E. teacher tried to get us to run the whole circumference, but turned us back when he noticed a pickup truck parked at the far end, and two lovers embraced on the ground beside it, she on her back and he on his left side, with his right arm mostly around her.
The half-dead grass that separated our neighborhood from the trailers of extra classrooms that ringed the backside of the school was a no man’s land. No playground, no parking spaces, no tetherball pole, no street light. It was (though no longer is) a sort of catwalk for becoming. A space to look out and see home in the distance, or school in the distance, and little between. A space for approaching the distant city with little more than expectation. When I was in kindergarten I was made to escort two little girls to class over this field while our moms watched from behind. One girl on each arm, and the teachers called me the Mack Daddy. That’s what the field made me. Just like walking home with my brother made me a buddy movie, full of loyalty and competitiveness.
Neither one of us had any idea what we were rushing to pick up, but as soon as we saw it we both ran. When I got holt of it I’m not sure whether my first instinct was to look at it or hide it; it was like one movement. Having it in my hands was like having wet my pants, pure power and embarrassment, like needing to put on more clothes and get naked at the same time. I showed it to my brother and whipped it away. Showed it and whipped it away. Showed it and whipped it away. To the point of shaking it as though it were still undeveloped.
It was a Polaroid photo of a heshe. A shehe. That’s what we called it. Boy parts and girl parts. But then we weren’t sure. We decided for a while that it was a really weird butt, so it was just funny. Somebody took a picture while they were making a doodie, but what they were doodïing wasn’t doodie, but rather ick and fingers. A gross fingers #2.
The field of becoming changed the image at least five times. After all, our legs were short and I did a lot of shaking. And then there was the backtracking, and the circles, and my brother chasing my left arm while I held the Polaroid high with my right and made pirouettes. The heshe poopie went in and out of my backpack: big pocket, little pocket, littlest pocket, pencil pouch.
And for all its transformations the photo was never evil until we were almost clear across the field, about to enter the neighborhood citadel. Then I cried, and easily. That’s the best part of the memory now. By that point we had settled on what it was. It was a man doing something bad to himself or bad to a child. Which somehow didn’t explain the girl parts, but even though we had four more days with the Polaroid we never looked at it very closely again.
At home we were already fully accomplices, which we would have been anyway. I didn’t yet know that we were already trying to kill experience, and why wouldn’t we be? We couldn’t have known how to preserve what was already in excess.
T.B.C.