Read Online The World of the End by Ofir Touché Gafla - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ofir Touché Gafla
Tags: Fiction
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use to praise the value of a picture.
Poppycock! That’s a cowpie dressed up as a chocolate soufflé. We aren’t going to be taken for that ride. I demand a change in the saying, the proverb, the colloquialism, or whatever other politically correct phrasing you decide to attach to a thousand words. Henceforth, a picture shall be worth a hundred thousand words—at least!
Surely you’ll agree that when humans look at photographs it’s impossible to know what feelings will flood their hearts, what thoughts will wander into their heads. Perhaps, while surveying the matted or glossy evidence, unexpected sentiments, warm clouds of nostalgia, telling revelations, or a thousand and one stories will make themselves known. Their worth has no quantitative definition, let alone a word cap.
It has been my privilege to be one of those pictures—controversial, understood by some, mysterious to others. I was born in Wales, thirty minutes drive from Bangor, next to a beautiful hostel in Bryn Gwynant on 8.13.89, at 11:37 A.M. , to an Olympus mother and a Kodak father. Two of my sisters were amateurishly overexposed, leaving twenty-two of us in the hands of the midwife, a salesman named Kobi. He and his wife went on vacation with their good friends, a recently married couple—a righter and an English teacher. My birthplace was a deep-green pitch of dew-soaked grass, littered with three scarlet-stained cigarette butts. In the background, a mountain flank plunged into the sea, placing the springy grass and the water on a single plane. The sky was decorated with an armada of feathery clouds and the wind brought with it the news of a premature autumn.
The righter and the English teacher were in the middle of the frame: He—a thin man with spiky brown hair, big blue eyes, and protruding cheekbones—in faded jeans and a red T-shirt and she—a thin woman with brown hair that fell to her shoulders, slanted blue eyes, full cheeks, and a long swan neck—in a violet-colored velvet dress. They were facing my mother, wrapped in an embrace. My mother giggled naughtily just as Kobi pressed the button, perhaps forecasting what was about to take place. Moments before, a sheep sauntered across the lawn and helped herself to some breakfast while getting rid of dinner. The two people that took her spot on the lawn had no idea what they were standing on, which most likely explains why they didn’t pay any attention to the joyous bleating from behind a large tree as the sheep watched the woman slip, the man try to arrest her fall, and the two of them tumbling together on the olive-like pellets from her intestines. My mother managed to capture the very moment of the fall. The two of them, laughing hysterically, looking at Kobi, asking him not to take the picture as he, to our good fortune, snapped three quick shots. Two, as I said earlier, were overexposed, and only your humble servant remains. The hug that preceded me, and the buffoonery in the pellets that followed, are both gone. Only the comic fall remains. If I’m not mistaken, the couple was more than happy to leave the picture with Kobi and his wife. Maybe they had enough pictures of themselves. Maybe, since I was a product of the friend’s camera, he was supposed to develop an extra copy, but due to a careless mistake, he tossed my dad into the trash and I was all that remained. All gloating aside, it would be perfectly reasonable to say that I am a natural survivor.
A word, if you will, on the matter of survival. In the moment before birth each picture is promised that she will live forever. That is the essence of our existence: immortality. We are the scraps of life you decide to save. But how, for God’s sake, are we supposed to live forever if you let us collect dust, turn yellow, crumble, tear, burn, and die? In a just world, you all would have been forced to answer for criminal abuse!
This Kobi character takes the picture without noticing that a loose hair has slipped out of his
Poppycock! That’s a cowpie dressed up as a chocolate soufflé. We aren’t going to be taken for that ride. I demand a change in the saying, the proverb, the colloquialism, or whatever other politically correct phrasing you decide to attach to a thousand words. Henceforth, a picture shall be worth a hundred thousand words—at least!
Surely you’ll agree that when humans look at photographs it’s impossible to know what feelings will flood their hearts, what thoughts will wander into their heads. Perhaps, while surveying the matted or glossy evidence, unexpected sentiments, warm clouds of nostalgia, telling revelations, or a thousand and one stories will make themselves known. Their worth has no quantitative definition, let alone a word cap.
It has been my privilege to be one of those pictures—controversial, understood by some, mysterious to others. I was born in Wales, thirty minutes drive from Bangor, next to a beautiful hostel in Bryn Gwynant on 8.13.89, at 11:37 A.M. , to an Olympus mother and a Kodak father. Two of my sisters were amateurishly overexposed, leaving twenty-two of us in the hands of the midwife, a salesman named Kobi. He and his wife went on vacation with their good friends, a recently married couple—a righter and an English teacher. My birthplace was a deep-green pitch of dew-soaked grass, littered with three scarlet-stained cigarette butts. In the background, a mountain flank plunged into the sea, placing the springy grass and the water on a single plane. The sky was decorated with an armada of feathery clouds and the wind brought with it the news of a premature autumn.
The righter and the English teacher were in the middle of the frame: He—a thin man with spiky brown hair, big blue eyes, and protruding cheekbones—in faded jeans and a red T-shirt and she—a thin woman with brown hair that fell to her shoulders, slanted blue eyes, full cheeks, and a long swan neck—in a violet-colored velvet dress. They were facing my mother, wrapped in an embrace. My mother giggled naughtily just as Kobi pressed the button, perhaps forecasting what was about to take place. Moments before, a sheep sauntered across the lawn and helped herself to some breakfast while getting rid of dinner. The two people that took her spot on the lawn had no idea what they were standing on, which most likely explains why they didn’t pay any attention to the joyous bleating from behind a large tree as the sheep watched the woman slip, the man try to arrest her fall, and the two of them tumbling together on the olive-like pellets from her intestines. My mother managed to capture the very moment of the fall. The two of them, laughing hysterically, looking at Kobi, asking him not to take the picture as he, to our good fortune, snapped three quick shots. Two, as I said earlier, were overexposed, and only your humble servant remains. The hug that preceded me, and the buffoonery in the pellets that followed, are both gone. Only the comic fall remains. If I’m not mistaken, the couple was more than happy to leave the picture with Kobi and his wife. Maybe they had enough pictures of themselves. Maybe, since I was a product of the friend’s camera, he was supposed to develop an extra copy, but due to a careless mistake, he tossed my dad into the trash and I was all that remained. All gloating aside, it would be perfectly reasonable to say that I am a natural survivor.
A word, if you will, on the matter of survival. In the moment before birth each picture is promised that she will live forever. That is the essence of our existence: immortality. We are the scraps of life you decide to save. But how, for God’s sake, are we supposed to live forever if you let us collect dust, turn yellow, crumble, tear, burn, and die? In a just world, you all would have been forced to answer for criminal abuse!
This Kobi character takes the picture without noticing that a loose hair has slipped out of his
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