for when there’ll be remembering in our futures for your hope she’d said her daniel went to become a god for those who’d never seen one hope’s daniel began with poison took a right to their world and then left to the edge to escape her name’d been hope told you from his sin to begin again hope’d said you know the promise when in the record daniel screamed doom pending long before dooms hadn’t bothered to make a difference had been pending for decades with hope and him and the world and most everyone believed a part of what her daniel said about doom about themselves or at least about a friend of a friend they knew and maybe if daniel hadn’t heard of any of them before on the computers i prefer a radio her daniel said when there’d been plenty of doom to go round on radio waves more every day he’d bought a satellite he’d read articles on trusting your own dish the people daniel could hear any minute of a day or hour after hour so many how could daniel not have been forgiven to have forgotten his hope she’d said we called them crocus to get her daniel to pipe down about doom pending when any day now our daniel would stop doom pushing when hope’d said to him in the record we called them crocus to get daniel to pipe down daniel had said unfixed agfa pusillanimous in response and hope would say any definition of color she could conjure but she always ended with how children bloomed in soft devonshire air to shut him up before he went back to doom peddling came after their shoe boxes hidden in rubber bins in concrete shelters for years turned all halide ko dak silver and marry gold and hope would say the word marigold correctly daniel’d sang the words to keep from pounding colors in his mind he carved descriptions of colors then blurted fu jee trans parency olive and daniel said es ex seventy said to hope your fingerprints on the prints he said from when the photo been taken turn meringue daniel said pole a roid for when photographs went to die in boxes inside boxes they were not the color of any day that’d ever even been on the day daniel pushed a red button for each exposure you’d heard the stories he told again and again of how he saved up allowances to run through a whole pack of twelve at a time on a leaf or a barn animals’ faces cows held most still cows still made ghosts in light daniel said to hope at night at the end not in the record at all she held his hand put it on her thigh maybe like that real day the color of the full eclipse she’d said in the record before the end and daniel remembered the hippies and the children scientists and the people who just wanted to drink on a tailgate how they had all driven north all had come together in open spaces not too long before all had needed to stay apart that day the light was like an es ex seventy for hours daniel said but he remembered time wrong the eclipse of twenty seventeen only lasted for a little over two minutes where they’d been and he said hippies and children scientists wouldn’t have come this far for only two minutes daniel argued into the dark beneath their ceiling hope had started it and it was all day the light like that and the grind of the motor of a polaroid sx-70 came from his mouth when he’d become hungry only every few days there at the end daniel didn’t eat much but when he ate he ate cheese any kind of cheese and soda crackers whole plastic sleeves of them at a time called saltines then without bothering to wash them down he liked to make a mush of them in his mouth the crumbs all the way down the front of his shirt and he’d spit out sound of a polaroid camera from decades before powered by a battery in each package of twelve he explained to hope over and over and he never felt ready between what images others framed to put on walls each year to mark time passing at the end not in the record he’d begun scribbling notes on what to burn and what jay pegs and jifs and es vee gees to bundle a man he’d met on the short wave told me galactic intelligent life forms prefer es vee gees and notes on what came next to delete he’d wanted to leave behind too less for anyone to need worry about how memories made him feel older each day bad ones on his fingernails and hair daniel wanted only the good of him the less the better made available for our galactic intelligent forms for when we found him in the record there’d been only dozens of photos of his cows and flowers and clouds and hope’d seen daniel delete their wedding photos russians won’t make us avatars or eh eye daniel’d been heard talking at the end about artificial intelligence over and over again to the postal workers hope’d already felt she didn’t have enough good ones to remember him by what’d been hard to remember the bad ones not bad enough to not want to have no photos left daniel felt we were poisoning the future with our past us and she tried to see his point and there’d come time when daniel finally passed hope had dreamt of when and how only the day before she’d put all of themselves with a password all of her own on a cloud even the ones he didn’t like daniel couldn’t been mad at hope for what he couldn’t know at the end before afterward she could apologize in heaven about what she cared for after when hope stopped blaming him done with believing his blaming of clouds for being clouds.
Philip James Shaw creates communications on behalf of organizations dedicated to equity and access in health and education. They write and paint and live with their partner and dog child in Port Townsend, Washington. Find more of their work at PhilipJamesShaw.com.