A Sweet Surpise

Sometimes there's a yes. My fiction submission to the Santa Fe New Mexican's Pasatiempo annual writing contest won second place. It's a snippet from my novel-in-progress, "Bodies of Water."

Catching the Light

Grey seeps around the window shades, granular as dust. A dove coos. Whistle, gurgle, liquid query; soon a whole chorus. Bells clang through clean, washed air: the sharp, smoky smell of early mass right there under her nose, a body-memory of kneeling at the rail rumpled and half-asleep, hair uncombed, the host chalky on her tongue when she was seven, eight.

She stretches, rolls over, finds the socks she kicked off during the night and pulls them on. Pulls on shorts, t-shirt, fumbling to get out the door before the light comes up. Swipes a comb through her hair, resents the time it takes to pee, brush her teeth, get her shoes on. The camera bag is packed, ready to go, hanging on the doorknob where she left it last night. The door bursts open and she’s out into the dawn, spicy-cinnamon-sandalwood smell of wet cedar the first thing in her lungs, and in her eyes the receding tide of night still clinging to trees, streets, houses, still gathered in deep, ragged pools along the acequia, washing up over lawns. The perfect time to stalk light. She is a panther, pursuing some juicy, elusive prey.

The streets of Rosalia catch fire when the sun crests the mountains, become for a few moments—ten at the outside—ecstatic rivers of molten air mixed with fiery ground in the brilliant, heatless light. She has only this small window of time to set up her tripod in the shadow of unlit trees, to catch the flare as it barrels down the mountain and floods the town. Each morning for a week now, she has walked the neighborhood at dawn, observing the angle of light, timing its quietly gaudy display, turning over in her mind how she might capture it. There is a haunting quality to it that makes her think of the photographs of Duane Michaels—the ethereal light at the top of a stair, the end of a tunnel. These leafy tree-tunnels are like that, full of a mysterious beckoning.

She jogs toward the spot she has chosen, tripod slung over her shoulder. She knows her eye and the camera lens are not the same, that what she sees is not necessarily what she gets. Sometimes it takes the whole of her skill and experience, plus patience and luck and plain hard work to translate her vision into a photograph. Sometimes, it’s the other way around, and something shows up on the film that she didn’t even know was there. Serendipity, the photographer’s best friend.

This particular vision, of streets and air and shrubbery on fire, excited into furious movement by the wakening sun, is daunting, and she wants to be ahead of it, ready, calm, poised and breathing in the way she knows will help her snap the shutter at exactly the right instant. Instants, for it’s never just one. She puts her eye to the viewfinder, focuses on the middle distance, and waits. Beneath the arching canopy of ancient, gnarled poplars, the earth releases its night breath, cool and dense to her skin. The stillness is broken by echoing bird calls, a screeching peacock, church bells chiming the quarter-hour, the drone of a lawnmower starting up. She wonders who would be mowing at this hour, when the grass is still soaked with dew. Another of the strange contradictions in this lush, watery, tropical enclave set down in a burning sea of desert.

And then suddenly it’s upon her, the light rushing just like water, swirling right up the long leafy tunnel, engulfing everything in its path, blazing across her toes, setting her legs on fire, and she is snapping and telling herself for the briefest instant: bracket, bracket, and then there are no more words or thoughts and her mind is empty and full of the fiery glory lighting up everything in front of her, around her, maybe in her, and she is no longer separate from it, wanting it. She disengages the camera, abandons the tripod, and steps into the flame, her hand, eye, mind, camera, prey all one now, merged in the conflagration.