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By Root 451 0

with her mother, and fall asleep to the sound of Iris’s typing, the quick footsteps of little intellectual mice. Iris had become a journalist. When friends asked Anna what her mother wrote about she would say: Pretty much anything. And that was true. She had written everything from restaurant reviews to celebrity interviews to investigative pieces about insurance fraud or water safety. Eventually, Iris remarried as well, but it didn’t last long, and when it was over she decided that marriage was not for her. Shortly after, Anna gave birth to Honor, to Iris’s horror and chagrin, and it was really only then that Iris discovered the meaning of familial pleasure. Honor she adored. The child returned her affection, not caring if Iris showed up two hours late for a visit or if she spent the whole time talking about her latest article. Iris oozed love for the little girl and would look at her with a gaze of such acceptance and devotion that the child could not help but fall into her grandmother’s arms. This was helpful, since her mother was still in school.

One day Honor was at her grandmother’s house while Anna studied in the library for her graduate school entrance exam. The little girl wandered freely around the apartment. Iris was at her typewriter. It was 1988. Outside, the world was gleefully throwing off the old habits of book learning and face-to-face communication in favor of newer, more technologically advanced and faster methods of progressing in life without having to actually experience it, but in Iris’s apartment the walls were lined with the soon-to-be-relics of print culture, although they did not know yet of their imminent irrelevance and so stood proudly at attention or jauntily slanted and at ease at their posts. Honor loved to pull out a bunch of them and use them to build castles as if they were blocks, but now she was getting old enough to enjoy flipping through them and studying the pictures or the tiny letters which she was just beginning to understand could interact with one another to make sense.

The narrow hall was a dim haze. The dust motes blanketing the bookshelves that lined the passage swirled frantically when Honor passed, like thousands of tiny fish disturbed by a great ship. The little girl, not yet five, knelt down to scan the lowest shelves and found a gigantic book, The History of Italian Art, lying on its side. It was a huge linen-covered tome missing its glossy wrapping and when Honor opened to the middle the smooth pages buckled and swelled in a wave and out rolled a faded piece of paper the size and shape of a ticket stub. It wafted to the ground and was blown, who knows by what wind, through the space under a door that Honor had never before noticed. It was a thin door, inconspicuously located at a break between the shelves, painted a graying white just like the shelves and walls, and it had a fancy cut-glass doorknob. Honor instinctively lifted herself up onto her tiptoes and turned the knob. Here was a closet, stuffed with shopping bags that in turn overflowed with more stuff. The door had obviously been squeezed shut against the tide of unwanted things that could not be parted with, and so with its opening a few bags were dislodged and one spilled its entire contents onto the floor.

It was a bag of photographs. Contact sheets, individual prints, little plastic boxes of slides, vellum packets of shiny negatives, they all tumbled out at Honor’s feet. She looked down at them as if jewels from a treasure chest had spilled in front of her. She sat down. She made herself comfortable among the heap of things obviously so unnecessary that they had been hidden away and not missed. She felt at liberty to play with them. There was no one and nothing to stop her. She noticed a pen idling on the floor of the closet, toward the back. She crawled over the photographs and stretched her arm into the closet and grabbed the pen. It was a blue ballpoint. The top had been chewed. She pulled it off, picked up a large contact sheet covered with black and white images of children, and began to write her