Summary

In I, Eddy finds a photo his mother, Monique, took of herself “the year she turned twenty” (3). Eddy imagines her taking it. She “is tilting her head” and “smiling slightly” (3). He “can’t find the words” to describe the way she looks (4). The image “evokes freedom” and “perhaps, also, happiness” (4). Seeing it makes Eddy realize Monique had a life before his birth. He has rarely thought about her as someone who had “been young and full of dreams” (4).

The photo makes Eddy realize how much of Monique’s life was destroyed “by misery and masculine violence” (4). His father was involved in this destruction, but Eddy is responsible, too.

One day, Eddy and his younger brother fought in front of Monique. When his brother called him “a faggot,” Eddy smashed “the bottle of colored sand” his brother had made for him (5, 6). His brother...