Elara stood on B Street NE, the railroad tracks humming faintly behind her like an unfinished sentence, their metallic groan vibrating through the parched earth. The house loomed small, weathered wood buckling under time's relentless weight, its faded clapboards splintering like cracked porcelain. Dust swirled in the drought-stricken air, coating her tongue with a gritty, forgotten taste. "Memory is just erasure," she murmured to herself, echoing Derrida's trace—the present always haunted by what's absent, each recollection a deferral of meaning. She touched the peeling doorframe, rough flakes catching under her nails, and the scene dissolved into haze.
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| Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025 |
Inside, butterflies pinned under glass caught the slanting light, their iridescent wings frozen in eternal flight, remnants from Aunt Jorena's collection. Snapdragons drooped in a forgotten vase, their petals curling like brittle paper. On the side of the house, the fig tree bowed heavy in summer's haze, ripe fruits splitting open under the sun's merciless glare, purple skins weeping sweet, sticky juice that dripped onto the cracked soil below. The air thickened with their overripe scent—cloying, almost fermented, mingling with the faint rot of fallen leaves. "Those figs were abundance itself," Grandmother's voice echoed in her mind, a whisper carried on the wind, "but time devours them, like Baudrillard's simulacrum—the real fruit gone, only the hyperreal memory lingers, sweeter in absence." Elara reached out, imagining the soft give of the skin under her fingers, the burst of warm pulp on her tongue, a fleeting sweetness that masked the underlying decay. The backyard garden stretched as a faded Eden, zinnias wilting in the heat, periwinkles nodding under dust, their colors muted like old film stock.
She wandered to the detached garage, dim and musty, shadows pooling in corners heavy with the smell of oil and aged wood. There, the old agitator washing machine squatted like a mechanical beast, its enamel chipped and cold to the touch. Beside it, the hand-cranked wringer gleamed dangerously, rollers slick with residue, ready to catch fingers in their merciless, grinding grip—a vise of steel and rubber that promised pain. "Technology reveals the world," Elara whispered, invoking Heidegger's essence of techne, "but it endangers us, enframing our hands in its gears—nothing safe, everything a standing-reserve for harm, reducing life to calculable resources." Grandmother had warned her once, her voice sharp over the machine's rhythmic churn: "Turn that crank slow, child, or it'll claim your flesh, pull you into the mechanism of the everyday." The danger was existential, a 20th-century peril hidden in domestic tools, power lurking in the hum of progress, the air buzzing with latent threat.
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| Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025 |
In Antonioni's lingering gaze, the world unfolded slowly—alienation in every empty space. She wandered to the Depot District, streets eerily silent under the relentless sun, the pavement radiating heat that shimmered like a mirage. Boutiques with Tuesday-Saturday signs stared blankly through grimy windows, their displays frozen in contrived charm. A lone festival banner fluttered listlessly, fabric whispering against the breeze. "This revitalization is hyperreality," Elara said aloud to a passing shadow, channeling Baudrillard again, her words swallowed by the void. "Oil booms in 1913, trolleys clanging through dust-choked air—now it's all cute facades over abandonment, a simulation of life where commerce once pulsed." An old man on a bench nodded, or maybe he didn't, his face weathered like the cracked sidewalks. "Power erases the archive," he grumbled, Foucauldian wisdom in his drawl, cigarette smoke curling acrid into the stillness. "Segregated streets, Colored Town across the tracks. Chickasaw freedmen turned sharecroppers, their stories buried under interstates, voices silenced in the roar of engines."
Crossing the elevated road, tires thumping over seams, she met the sign head-on: "Colored Town," stark white letters on rusted metal, greeting those who dared pass over the rails—a literal decree, segregation etched in iron and paint, unyielding as the tracks below. Houses stood prouder on C Street, some boarded with plywood scarred by weather, but others defiant, larger than the white-side ruins, their porches creaking under invisible weight. Pit bulls barked from yards, chains rattling like distant thunder, the air sharp with the scent of wild brush and untamed earth. "Erasure is selective," Elara whispered, her breath fogging the car window. "Foucault would say power inscribes history on the land—east side crumbles slower because resilience was forged in exclusion, bodies marked by the divide." A woman on a porch waved, or perhaps it was the wind rustling faded curtains. "Milo's ghosts linger," the woman called, her voice carrying over the hum of a distant train. "Sharecroppers to landowners, but memory delays meaning—Derrida's différance. What you see differs from what was, each glance a postponement."
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| photo by Susan Smith Nash 2025 |
The Arbuckle Mountains rose in the distance, jagged limestone outcrops piercing the horizon, wind whipping cold across her skin like a indifferent caress. Elara stood at the panoramic edge, the void stretching endlessly, gravel crunching underfoot, the chill seeping into her bones. "Modern disconnection," she thought, Antonioni's ennui settling in like fog—figures isolated in vast landscapes, relationships fractured by silence. A train blocked the path below, its cars idle and monolithic, like memory's impasse, the air heavy with diesel fumes. "Would I live here, in parks' tranquility away from the tracks?" she asked the mountains, her words lost in the gusts. They echoed back faintly: "No. Memory erases itself, leaving squalor."
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| Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025 |
Back at the high school, Corinthian columns haunted since '97, she lingered in the shadow of their elegance, the stone cool and unyielding against her palm. The past constructed, deconstructed—erasure complete, the wind carrying only echoes.
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| Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025 |
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| Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025 |
#ardmoreOklahoma #oklahoma #history #constructivefiction #memory
Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D.
