How I Forgot the Picture of Us as Babies
My cousin said would I like to burn a picture of us from when we were babies? I said no. My cousin said but if we do then we will remember it more. I said we don’t remember it, we were babies, we just remember it from the picture. My cousin said you have to trust me, once we burn it then we will remember being babies, but not because of the picture. I thought we should ask our parents. My cousin thought they should never know. My cousin said they don’t want us to know about when we were babies. They want to hold onto us from then all to themselves. I really did not want to destroy the picture. We are in overalls. We are looking at one another with love rather than at the camera at all. I don’t know how to say loud enough that my cousin should put down the matchbook. There is a metal bowl that my aunt uses to burn incense on the windowsill. That’s what my cousin uses to make sure the fire will end once all the edges burn. The picture will still be the picture so long as it has edges. When the edges burn so much that the burning edges become nothing and then the nothing takes over wherever the edges go, then there will be no picture. My cousin doesn’t notice how I’m crying. I can’t tell if I should hide my face. I look at the picture with a focus so deep my eyes hurt in their middles. Now is the time to commit the image to memory. I’m the one that burns first. I burn enough to provide a moment of heat. The fire lit from the back so I didn’t know what part of us would begin the disappearing. The fire undresses my overalls, and I feel how nakedness can be nothingness. It looks like my arm spreads the fire to my cousin’s arm, then it’s the both of us that are gone. All that there’s left is a stretch of lawn. I remember playing there, but when we were older. I don’t remember ever wearing the overalls. I try to remember that they are red. It hurts to cry and hide it. My cousin has to light an extra match to finish the grass. My cousin puts a licked thumb into the ash. My cousin puts the ash smudged thumb under my eyes. My cousin says you look tired. My cousin says you should take a nap. My cousin says when you wake up, you’ll remember when we met as babies. My cousin wonders out loud if we conspired to talk that day, before we could. We might have babbled, babbled, then said cousin, babble, babble, cousin. I think that in the picture, my hair had never yet been cut. In the picture my hair could have hidden my eyes if I cried. I wipe my tears, and they mix with the ash. It smells under my nose like the incense that were burnt before the picture. My cousin laughs at me, and I can’t tell how much it’s meant to be cruel. My cousin says you look like when our mothers have mascara on and then have too much to drink. My cousin says you have to see how you look. With my cousin’s hands connecting at thumbs and fingers, my cousin frames me and pretends to click a camera. My cousin looks at me like I’m a picture. I look to make sure the matchbook is out of my cousin’s hands. My cousin says I’ll always remember this, mascara down to your lips, probably praying to somebody how you wish the picture might have been a duplicate.
Mini-interview with Niles Baldwin
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
NB: If I’m thinking about a moment that has shaped me as a writer it’s mostly moments of being given a book, connecting on new levels, caring for language in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Other than that, so many moments of encouragement from various people along the way as I moved from a not great writer to a gradually improved one.
Come to think of it, I actually think the moment I wrote this story was a shaping one. Forming connections to my own writing has been so life-affirming and my connection to this piece felt instantly significant. And I’m grateful that as I revisit it, my care for it is changing and expanding, and still very full of tenderness.
HFR: What are you reading?
NB: Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet on Dzanc Books. Ellen is a friend of mine and to know a bit better the inner workings of how she has lived in the world has been majorly affecting. It was so great and I don’t think I’ll ever forget how it has felt to read it.
Also reading Errand Weather by Nathan Dragon from B-Side Editions. The way it is quiet and thoughtful and caring made me feel comforted and bound to reality in anchoring ways. When I got the book, the publisher had written a note to me that said something like “I hope Errand Weather is good company.” That was spot-on what it was.
Two very different books that will feel linked in my head forever because I loved them both at the same time.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “How I Forgot the Picture of Us as Babies”?
NB: It’s a section of a novel I’m working on about these cousins. As I have spent so much time with them I am pleased how much my vision of them has altered, but so much of the core of who they are is maintained. I like to put them in a room and see how it goes. Sometimes they are very kind to one another. In this piece, not so much.
I spend so much time thinking of how much our memories are attached to the images we are able to hold, physically or now on our devices. I was on a backpacking trip when I was just out of high school and I am very curious how much the pictures of that trip dictate my memory of it.
My parents have this dresser at their house and it is full of old pictures from the times of our family before us kids and then with us. One of my favorite things to do is when my brother is visiting we spend a whole afternoon looking at them. I wish we still held pictures this way and I hope they never get burnt up when you don’t want them to.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
NB: This cousins novel is a constant place I can go in order to write. I’m not putting much pressure on myself to complete it. It feels right now like an okay time for a break. But I still work on it every few days or so, mostly organizationally. Finishing the novel at this point will need some bigger picture thinking that I think may only come with time.
Other than that, I try to maintain some practice of standalone pieces. Also, I started writing poetry maybe a year and a half ago and it’s been very exciting to explore that. It’s fun to find out what other things I like to write about through poetry. It’s nice because I’m finding that my poetry has a sense of humor, where my prose mostly does not, unfortunately. But in real life, I’m funny.
Niles Baldwin lives in Kittery, Maine. His work can be found in Soft Union, BRUISER, Burial Magazine, Sleepingfish XX, and elsewhere. His first book, a novel titled Her Favorite Cow, is forthcoming from Long Day Press.
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