A Love Like Blood Read Free

soundless words, I missed him reaching into his desk and realized this after a magnifying glass smashed my father’s head. What the magnifying glass could not show, being in black and white, was the blood under his thumb, nor the spotted tissue beside my foot. The photograph embodies every lesson that I have learned from Father as a photographer – from image structure and contrast and balance to darkroom editing and hand placement. A real education is unconscious seduction. Want and risk in wanting wait under the laurel wreath. However, Father has never seen the print and never will, hopefully. He would rip it up into a million little pieces and demand I hand over the negative.
    Whenever we find ourselves staring through lenses, he loves to say, a photographer’s greatest weapons are his hands not his eyes. I know that to be true firsthand.

Chapter 3
    T hrough the fisheye peephole, the crimson and clay-colored world kindles under the late afternoon sun. Careful not to cause a sound, I crack the door and peek out, listening for the tap tap of church shoes. A watch ticks. My knee bangs against the doorframe. Purple leaves on a head-high shrub shake. I jerk back, seeing a hand move, and relax. Brett nods, standing at the bottom of the steps.
    â€œI’ll help you,” he says.
    Tiptoeing down into danger, I glance in both directions first. Then, I leap looking towards Brett’s house; however, he loops his arm around my arm. Now, I cannot disappear. The puffed-up paint splatter itches rubbing against my skin. Glancing at the truck and then his face, I stop convinced I am with an aged version of him. Somehow time has sped up and spun a net around him, plucking out his youth as if it were nose hairs. His face was mannified, although now it is gaunt. The skin under his eyes looks hollow. In his eyes, fear appears to be a foreign feeling. His boots march on the path toward an enemy, whose hands are sharper than thorns. A flattened box spins in the air from the back of the truck to the driveway. Red-bricked and with cobweb cracks, the driveway is a reminder of Father’s violence. The bloated inside of the truck is a visual catalog of his madness. On the seven-hour drive, every pothole that rattled the wheels was a fist in my gut. I convinced myself that the sardined furniture was crushing up my cameras. Being pig-headed, he selected the mid-sized rental over the longer truck that we needed to save eight dollars and forty-five cents. Two bloody tissues slide on top of a box labeled hot lights from boxes moving. Scuff marks cover the outside. Lenses and, under the word, for the studio, is written in parenthesis on the box to my right. Father’s forehead wrinkles pushing a bundle of light stands to the truck’s edge. A burlap rice sack is wrapped around the stands, and the bundle is tied together with an electrical cord. Each stand weighs thirty pounds to support heavier photography equipment. The sack, cord, and stands can turn into instruments of torture at any moment. Brett and I grab opposite ends of the sack together in a synchronized movement.
    â€œStop. He doesn’t need your help,” Father says.
    â€œMr. Tynes, yes he does.”
    â€œNo, he doesn’t. He needs to stop being weak.”
    Glassy-eyed and focusing his fury on me, he tucks his left fist under his right triceps and his right fist under his left triceps. His way is the only way a man should cross his arms, according to him. The gesture is a period at the end of a sentence that does not need words. An entire non-verbal vocabulary exists for his violence.
    â€œNo, I can manage,” I say to Brett.
    Hesitating at first, he sets his side of the sack down at a long-drawn-out pace. Father’s eyes throw daggers at the damned world beneath his worn sandals. The thick layer of shea butter that I smoothed over my face is sweating off in the Midwest heat. Milky beads drip to the sack. My thin shirt sticks to my chest and