A very short story about an encounter with an image of a woman, and the viewer/narrator’s gradually accruing response.
A close reading of a newspaper photograph in which the young woman stands in a wood, side on, by a large tree. Her hair obscures her features. Sunlight plays on her back. Beauty amid peace and silence, that’s his impression.
He notices the nearest hand is clenched like a fist. And that her heels are a little higher than her toes.
He looks at the leaves beneath her feet. She doesn’t appear to be standing on them, she isn’t standing on them, there’s a gap between her feet and the leaves.
“Suddenly, sickeningly, he understands what it is he is looking at. The woman is not standing at all.”
Sunlight has bleached out the rope. The profusion of hair hides a noose. He reads the caption. It tells him she’s a refugee who hanged herself after Serbian forces stormed Srebrenica.
The photograph, as it turns out, is a record of a body without pain, without pleasure, a corpse.
I have recalled this text during every war since I first read it almost fourteen years ago. So I have recalled and read it often, far too often. Focussed, concise, and tragically perennial.
First published in Heart’s Wings and Other Stories, Carcanet 2010
A Personal Anthology 