East Bay Slimes

ANTIQUE PHOTOGRAPHS //

✋wood glue jelly + large photo-print clay (featuring my great-great grandmother & her sisters) -- press onto clay frame right before mixing
👃cozy attic, sandalwood boxes of herbal medicine & vintage makeup, time-worn wooden rocking chair, old linens, aged paper, antique candles

The box of yellowed photographs feels heavy in your hands as you carry it down from the attic, the soft clanking of ornate frames and the rustling of paper -- a box full of the secrets of those who lived before you. Perched on the bottom of the stairs, you flip back the dusty cover of an album that carries the tomb-like stuffiness of the attic.

A child in a rocking chair with a hollow gaze, body as stiff as the wooden chair she is perched on. She holds a porcelain doll dressed in the upper-class fashions of the era. You've seen the same chair and doll in the attic – the chair tucked away in a corner, the doll high on a shelf, cracked and dirty with age, dull eyes covered in dust. As you flip through the photos, the child ages, now joined by her sisters, but always, strangely, holding the doll with a faraway gaze.

One image makes your breath catch in your throat, it feels so familiar. Four women in ruffled dresses, hair done up in curls and ornaments. The sisters grown up. You recognize one of the faces, which is softly smirking – it’s the child with the doll, now in her twenties. Her eyes seem to gaze at something very far away.

From above you, behind the attic door, you hear faint laughter that snaps you out of your pondering. Your heart leaps as your mind jumps to the rocking chair, the doll, up there in the attic. Your eyes straining in the dark, you only see the closed door at the end of the dim stairwell. And then, you swear, you hear the soft unmistakable creak of the rocking chair. Some deep curiosity pulls you up the stairs. You carry the album with you, which suddenly feels light in your grasp.

The chair is no longer in its corner.

Instead, it sits in the middle of the room. The seat, empty a few minutes ago, is now occupied. The porcelain doll with the cracked face now rests there; its once-dull eyes now fixed on you, a half-smile across its face.