TE20 Migrant Mosaics

Birke

drove them to Graz only for her to be forced into a black, cob-wed infested dress, to then be accompanied by her grandmother to the graveyard by foot—a procession that nearly always commenced with her grandmotherwhispering, loud enough for others to hear but quiet enough to not count as an announcement: time to go see Grandpa, Birke. In her daydream, in the university class where the man with the brown felt hat tinkered with film, she watched the projection on the classroom wall. The man with the brown felt hat fed the film that she had seen of her childhood into the projector. She looked up onto the classroom’s wall expecting to see a traditional shot, one where the camera spread out wide featuring the entire scene and all of its characters: her father, the priest, her and her friends, her grandmother and their entire family walking to the graveyard in a pack. Instead, the camera, as if working on its own agenda, focused on peculiar details: a mouth, feet, forks and knives. She saw her own mouth. Each clip changed every second. Each clip featured a new version of her mouth. Different smiles. Her Easter smile. Her birthday smile. Her hello-grandmother-aunt- uncle-uncle-aunt-smile . They repeated themselves. The clips, manipulated by the man with the brown felt hat, sped up. What a disgusting smile, she thought in the theater, in her daydream. That thing should have a different word for it. That is not a smile. That is not a smile. Smiles are funny. She saw her feet: perfect, snug inside of her white, open-toed sandals. Theones hergrandmotherbought forherwhen theywent shopping. The ones that had tiny flowers on them. The perfect ones for a girl. Her feet were so well behaved. So symmetrically 209