Art by Paul Rios
Dear readers, Last Week’s Memoir is retooling for the New Year. We’ll be filling this space with random pictures and words until then. First up, we have a snippet from an unfinished script by the great Polish new wave filmmaker WŁADYSŁAW WADZINSKI. Enjoy!
It was 1971, storm plumes spiraling like staircases hanging heavy in the sky. I was not alive, but some people were. They lived and did things, as people often do. And now here we are: me writing, you reading. Somewhere, a calamity strikes. There, did you miss it?
Things change, that much you can be sure of. I remember discovering a photo album filled with pictures stuffed in plasticine sleeves. Yellowing images of old women on ochre couches, sipping tea. A grandfather clock in the corner of the room should have struck three, but it stopped working in ’64. It looks real good though, and it’s heavy. Don’t bother moving it.
In one of the pictures, there’s a girl. She wrote a poem on the back of a photo, a limerick really, sort of about David Bowie. It went:
There once was a man who was showy Who thought he could be David Bowie He went through some changes And his voice shifted ranges So everyone now calls him Zoë
Forty years later, and here we are. It’s been that long, really. Her sagging eyes gleam like the dumping of rare bands of light swirling in the foyer right now. It gets really warm in there. A spider bites your leg, and you blink and wince. And then everything changes again.