On the news again there is a still image— a little girl, standing outside the school she will never enter again.
She is wearing a yellow dress printed with children running through a field of lavender— one boy, in particular, has paused mid-play to gift his crush a five-thorn rose.
I’ve written before about other children with her same sad end:
ones who attended other schools and never came home on the school bus.
ones who never finished that baseball game they started.
ones who went shopping with their moms…
and nothing changed— just a few social media shares, some sad face, crying emojis.
Only her image moved others— to preserve the ache in her eyes, to render her sorrow as an A.I. portrait of grief made eternally happy:
a face on a chalkboard smudged in pastel tones; a Crayola portrait with a purple bruise smile; a neon poster with day-glow halo; a colored pencil sketch— her eyes erased and redrawn as stars.
I imagined how my Uncle Bob, a real artist, would have drawn her— if he were still alive.
Would he interrupt the pencil lines with an eraser, lighten her face? How would he show her— a child that can no longer touch?
I guess, he would find the work stubborn. Her eyes won’t soften/harden the right way— The same for her smile. He presses too hard, The paper tears, bruises, bleeds.
This sorrow won't stay inside the lines. It tangles, worms through the graphite, makes shadows and light fall the wrong way.
He gives up trying to paint her face forward— and has her peddling her red tricycle into a diminishing orange— her back turned away from us.
I imagine some museum curator, art critic, just doing their job— looking searching for a name hidden in brushstrokes, in corners, in the places where she might have whispered herself into permanence.
I search anyway, knowing I won’t find it either. Knowing the only signature she left would never be known— or found.
Like Bob I will erase, revise her again, watching my lines blur with her image—
hoping her true face remains. Still hers. Still gone.
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