My horse was called Emmy, short for Emerald Star. Dad’s more mature, larger mount was named Sassafras, which he shortened to Sassy. If we hadn’t taken these girls home, they’d have been shipped to the glue factory.
“… [C]atastrophe is not something awaiting as in the future, something that can be avoided with well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in (not only) its most basic ontological sense is something that always-already happened, and we, the surviving humans, are what remains …. Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic.”
Slavoj Žižek
Apocalyptica, “From Catastrophe to Apocalypse… and Back”
Turntables coated in rust and salt.
Illuminated beneath halogen lamps and stacked on one another like the layers of a wedding cake, the vintage record players boast a thick icing of sodium chloride and iron oxide, the granularity of which almost perfectly emulates the breading of a recently fried chicken finger.
Instead of occupying a warehouse shelf, a basement box, or a landfill, these outdated music makers ended up in a museum display case as witnesses to a singular event that some would define as catastrophic, others tragic, others fascinating. The museum, installed in a train station that hasn’t housed a locomotive for decades, commemorates the flooding and destruction of the town where it is located: Villa Epecuén.
My mother and stepmother got breast cancer six months apart. I realize, since only one of them is my blood relative, it doesn’t mean, you know—
Mid-summer, mid-pelvic exam, I am in the middle of this sentence when pain whooshes through me. I make a noise of surprise.
In 1927, a Russian architect named Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov built an astonishing home in Moscow for himself and his wife, son, and daughter. Using affordable materials (building supplies were scarce), Melnikov and his son pitched in alongside several hired laborers to frame and erect the house. A photo taken at completion shows the owner—a slender man dressed in a suit, spats, and top hat—standing proudly in front of his home, with his wife (sporting a plaid coat and matching hat) at his side.
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