The Doll and the Primer

In the kindergarten a doll sits on a bench beside an open primer, and I must be honest about what that is: an arrangement. Visitors have posed these props for years. The grief is real; the composition is curated by a decade of hands.

I crouched at a distance and photographed it as what it is, a shrine made collectively by strangers, and did not touch anything. Curated or not, the room itself does not lie: the small chairs, the peeling walls, the coat hooks at knee height.

The primer is open to a page of letters. Somebody once learned to read here. That fact needs no arranging, and it is the one I took with me.