NINA, AGE 9 On the hospital bed, her delicate body cradled between thin white pillows, Rosita dreamed. Pictures in metal, plastic, and wooden frames surrounded her, displaying images of friends and family, giving the appearance of an audience. However, the only visitor in the room was Nina, who sat on a tin chair beside the hat rack-shaped IV pole.
Nina couldn’t stop looking at the sepia-toned photograph in an oak frame. Propped on the window ledge, it featured a portrait of Great-Great-Grandmother Rosita as a young woman. The picture came from an era long before digital cameras. In those days, people posed in front of a boxy camera and had to wait days to learn whether they’d blinked. In her portrait, young Rosita wore a hundred strings of pale seed beads around her neck, against her buckskin-clothed chest. Some had glinted, each glass bead a mirror for the sun. Young Rosita’s fine black hair had symmetrically framed either side of her face. With dark, intense eyes, she’d stared directly at the camera lens, as if challenging the photographer to blink first. In most old-timey photos, the subjects didn’t smile, but young Rosita’s lips quirked in the suggestion of stifled laughter, as if she’d remembered a joke, one she could barely wait to share.
In the hospital room, Rosita’s hair fanned across her pillow in thin white wisps. Her eyes, now opening slowly and wearily, were sunken; advanced age had sculpted her face against the contours of her skull, revealing sharp ridges that had once been hidden by plump cheeks. Without her dentures, Rosita’s thin lips curled inward. Rosita looked toward Nina. Did she need something? Water? More medicine? In anticipation, Nina opened the speech-to-text translation app on her phone.
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