Where the Prints Are

September third. The two prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not on the wall. Not on the shelf. Not placed anywhere. Just leaning, at floor level, beneath the shelf where the collapsed bowl lives and where Gerald's vine has been doing its slow thing all summer. Every morning I walk past them. Sometimes I crouch down and look at them for a second, the way you look at a word you've written to see if it's spelled right, and then I stand up and make coffee and don't decide anything.

I wrote one sentence about them in the draft folder last week: 'the prints are still leaning against the wall and I think the not-placing might be doing something.' That was the whole sentence. I closed the folder. I'm publishing it now, more or less intact, because I think the sentence already knew more than I did when I wrote it.

still there. still leaning.

The windowsill has been no help. I keep looking at it, the letterpress card, the two photographs, Carol's small object, the cord, the named gap, and it does not suggest anything. The arrangement is finished. It said so itself months ago. The prints are not windowsill objects and I think I know that, which means they are something else, which means I don't know yet where they go or whether they go anywhere at all.

There's a version of this where I come back next week and they're hung somewhere and the whole thing resolves without much ceremony, and there's a version where I write in December that they're still leaning and that the leaning turned out to be the answer.

the windowsill has no opinion about the prints. I am taking notes.

Both feel equally possible right now, and for once I'm not in a hurry to find out which one it is.