Maura Lee Bee: The Batteries Are Probably Dying

Mango Wedge

My older brother moved north. When my family visits their house, we joke that Vermont’s Hispanic population goes up five percent. We play the music a little too loud, my cousin dancing bachata with the baby. Mi Mama is cooking empanadas, beef and cheese wafting. Papa snakes an olive out of the thin jar with his cinnamon finger. Dad is playing charades with his brothers. They shout: Hutia! Mike Piazza! Al Pacino! My niece shakes her hips early, lips curled in a soft grin, her delicate ponytail swinging in a teal scrunchie. She runs into the kitchen to reorganize the sauces. With her fierce hands she lines them up on the floor, cool air of the fridge whispering. My Aunt Vanessa takes a half moon of mango off a plate. It drips juice at the center of the table. She tells me that when she was pregnant, she loved to eat the fruit with salt. She doesn’t anymore because her husband says it makes her look bloated. She forgets about her favorite thing, asks me when I’m going to have a baby. My niece sits next to me and sighs. She brings her bottle to her mouth, removes one more piece of the bagels from back home, and looks up at me, consumed.

my niece with a camera in her hands

she holds the plastic square between her palms and asks me how it works. i struggle to tell her how my mother, mud caked on her knees, took photos of trees and gravestones when she was just older than her. there’s a history here—instructions from her aunt on focus, slides in a box from the attic, her father’s lenses dusted and snapped into place.

these apertures are open wounds. saw army baseball in Okinawa. composed portraits of women laughing alone, or together. saw the tribute from liberty park, my arms dangling over a railing, twin lights growing purpler. these images blown up for no one, except one time, on a jumbo-tron. how do I begin to tell her about developing film in the bathtub? how my sister would right the strips as they dangled from the shower rod. I’ve forgotten the words for developer and fixer.

all she knows is portrait mode. not yet does she know the ache of a jammed advance. or a broken spool. of a body knocked to the ground without apology. she doesn’t know how dreams fade. how we remaster them years later, scanned to a screen with a little touch of color. she only knows the world in black and white—but maybe that monochrome is just the beginning.

the batteries are probably dying, or the memory card is full. these things feel impossible. i tell her to look. through the viewfinder. to hit the shutter. she does this and runs off, delighted. i watch her hop through the kitchen, smiling, pretending to capture real moments all over.

Maura Lee Bee is a queer, LatinX writer based out of New York City. She has previously been published in Autostraddle, Bad Pony, and Ghost City Press. Her first book, “Peter & the Concrete Jungle” was published in 2017. When she isn’t busy dismantling an otherwise oppressive system, she enjoys reading books, baking pies, and meeting new dogs.