Every Monday, I choose an image. A stone, a shadow, sometimes a reflection, an object — nothing spectacular, just a point of attention. It is my way of inviting people to write, of holding something out toward the world and waiting to see what others will find in it.
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On Saturdays, I return to that image. I offer my own piece and share the texts I’ve received, the way one gathers the echoes of a single light.
This week’s photograph shows plastic ducks left sitting in a rain puddle. I took it a few years ago at the Jean-Talon Market, in front of a very popular fruit stand — and you can see why.
Here is my text, written from my impressions of that photograph:
Danger Zone
It had rained for three days without stopping. The plastic ducks floated in the puddle as though they had always been there, as though no one had placed them. Their yellow was too bright. Too deliberate. You could not look in their direction without wanting to look away.
The neighbourhood children had not played outside since Tuesday. No one had noticed exactly when. No one could have said how long the silence had been pressing down like that — slightly damp, slightly too large.
People measured. They came back to measure. The water did not move while you watched. It waited for you to go inside.
The thing grew by degrees. Slowly, with an intention that could not be named but that was felt in the calves, in the back of the neck, in the way the blinds stayed drawn on rue Principale. Someone had counted the ducks. Or perhaps not. The number circulated anyway, imprecise, slightly different each time it was repeated.
On the evening of the fourth day, the puddle had overflowed onto the sidewalk without the rain having picked up again. It had expanded from within, according to a logic that did not belong to the weather. The ducks were not drifting. They held a formation that no one could have described with any precision but that everyone recognized having seen before.
There was little talk of it. A kind of unease came with putting into words what was happening, as though naming the thing gave it permission to go on.
Then the sky emptied all at once, toward the end of the afternoon. The light came back yellow and low, the same colour as the ducks, and that too was something no one preferred to say. The puddle shrank over the course of a few hours. The ducks drew closer to the centre without the water pushing them there.
The sky returned to where skies end. Nothing more seeped out of this story.
The participants this week were very generous in their respective texts, all in French:
See you Monday, for another photo!