AUNT KATEby Eszter Takacs In her final weeks she is obsessed with windows, tracing the shape of every kind, inlaid and double-hanger slashed, slung and midway fingers along the cracks in the glass and eyes judging the distance back to Earth from every height and at church, outlining heads where pictures would be, she stares through into the abysmal flanks of awning, laying dimes in the bay sills, prying the panes of the jalousie, sitting under the cupola playing whistle-toe-miss-me, picking which square to shoot through, hands outstretched. The light comes in and skims the rack, slick cones under thistle against day-clouds, quarry and pine, spruce and willow tearing at the sky and there, underneath a monster she could scream herself free of everything electric. She plays gin rummy under blake-moons and lies to me that she forgot French, lost her cat and that her hands can’t wrangle the clay into make-believe anymore. Her statues come alive and I begin to believe the witch stories of always looking for knee-bones and lip-stained architecture, that everything crumpled between her fingers belonged to that moment when. |